Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Raghava Lawrence cracked a great template for making an easy, mindless entertainer by blending horror and comedy with a revenge drama. The story goes something like this: a scared hero meets a gory ghost. The gory ghost possesses the scared hero for a secret mission. The hero rebels. Then the ghost tells a sad backstory. The sympathetic hero relents. The ghost gets its revenge. Now, replace the ghost with a transplanted hand, and that is pretty much what I’m Game is. Dulquer Salmaan plays Dan John, a rich businessman with a gambling problem. He is a spoilt brat who wants to make a point to his father, mother and the world in general, but only ends up losing money in cricket league betting. While escaping gangster moneylenders, he meets with an accident, loses his hand and gets it transplanted from an anonymous donor. Once his transplanted hand starts to function, it starts operating on its own.

Of course, Toxic has a narrator. How can it not? How can it not have the lazy storytelling device that’s quintessential of this brand of film that’s basically ‘stuti puranam’ (hymn of adoration) of the protagonist. How can we just have an introduction scene of Yash without a narration in the background that is all talk and no sense. How can he make a direct entry, without teasing the fans with glimpses of his hands, neck tattoo and cigar, before finally revealing his face. So, yes, Toxic has a narrator, the bazooka gun, small guns, big guns, big cigars, small joints, women, more women, beheadings, blood splattering, mutilated hands, mutilated legs and for good measure, also another Yash! What it doesn’t have is the depth and style it so badly attempts at.

Vishwanath & Sons deals with a red-flag subject, fronted by a protagonist who is a walking, talking green flag. Sanjay Vishwanath (Suriya), a multi-millionaire businessman and Olympic-medal-winning shooter, credits his father for teaching him all those valuable lessons. He becomes a skilled shooter after his father buys him a toy gun and when Sanjay hits his first target, his dad is overjoyed and claps.

Any criticism against Jana Nayagan hits a brick wall of an excuse, one that demands cinema be compromised for a superstar. Viewers are expected to overlook the film straying from narrative and form to cater to fans, because the film is a farewell gift made for the fans by a superstar who has built his career on such mindless commercial films. Hence, expecting anything out of the ordinary is dismissed as unwise. It becomes a matter of bargain. But Jana Nayagan can’t just be that. It has another job. While it’s a swansong for a superstar-actor, it also has to serve as a war cry for a new political leader. In the end, Jana Nayagan is less a film and more fan service, and even more a campaign reel.

There are several hilarious chunks in Idhayam Murali, but the funniest one is unintentional. In the second half, Sam (Preity Mukundan) tells Idhaya (Atharvaa), in the same breezy tone you’d use to describe wrapping up a work call, “Ippa thaan oru mission mudichom. So konjam naalaiku rest” (We just finished off one mission. We will rest for a while). By this point, it is well established that Sam is a NASA astronaut, which is exactly why the line lands as comedy rather than drama. It’s a very specific kind of silliness, one Tamil cinema has flirted with before. The film doesn’t hide that it’s chasing a Gautham Menon-ish vibe, and this scene recalls a bit from Neethaane En Ponvasantham: a throwaway line establishing that Varun’s (Jiiva) family has grown rich and posh, simply by mentioning that his retired parents are now off travelling the world. Both moments reach for a big, specific, hard-to-verify detail and use it as shorthand for status or drama, without doing any of the narrative work to earn it.

Superhero films have become synonymous with worldbuilding, and any film in the genre that does less — fewer interwoven narratives, callbacks, and inside jokes — tends to feel odd (this is more a critique of the trend than the films themselves). Maybe that’s why James Gunn’s reimagined DC Universe continues its existential struggle, because Superman (2025) and the latest release, Supergirl (2026), are less about being pieces of a larger puzzle. That means these films don’t have an easy way out and have to be self-sufficient. That’s both the boon and bane of director Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl — it is indeed a story- and character-driven movie, but it lacks the punch and fails to be the event superhero films have habituated us to till now.

The trope of the retired badass, or, to put it locally, the Baasha template, never grows dated because it is one of the most relatable tropes in cinema. Wait, hear me out. You could be anyone: a teacher, an autowala, a clerk, or a naive watchman; suddenly these films enable you to imagine a badass past life for yourself. After all, everyone is the protagonist of their own story in their head. That’s the allure. A sleeping giant finally rises from slumber to save the day, bringing a sort of catharsis for the viewer, who can imagine their own version of a bloody past.

Baahubali, KGF and Salaar’s success has set a trend: films increasingly become hype instruments for their heroes. The template is now painfully familiar: a stranger arrives in town, bewildered by the hero’s omnipresent worship. He then meets another archetype: the hypeman, clearly of the land, dispenses worldly wisdom like a street philosopher. The stranger, suitably elitist and condescending, serves as the audience surrogate. The hype rural man becomes the narrator. In Peddi, Boman Irani gets the thankless honour of the uber-cool stranger, dragged through a dense forest by the hypeman just to hear the legend of Peddi (Ram Charan).