Aditya Shrikrishna

Kanguva is a flaming mess. The “pan-India” bug is upon actor Suriya, the film’s producers and Siva, and they don’t have a clear strategy to achieve it. There are no ideas here, just loglines. There is no writing here, just random deaths and fight sequences. There is no story here, just events. This is taking “event film” much too literally. Even if you are ready to forgive all that, there is no actual filmmaking here; just a bunch of shots strung together with no coherence or cohesion. During the film’s promotions, much was made of the makers’ respect for SS Rajamouli. After all, he is the progenitor of this pan-India bug that spares none. But no one in the Kanguva camp stopped for a minute, sat down and thought hard about what makes Rajamouli. What makes his cinema, cinema. Kanguva is not cinema.

There are always visual and grammatical cues to determine the origin of any kind of cinema. In India, it differs with language and region but there is one kind of image that is not exactly the pride of Tamil cinema. Simplistic and overused in the last thirty years, its progenitor is probably director Shankar though the image draws power from the long history of Tamil Nadu in post-independent India.