Saibal Chatterjee

Three M’s - Muslims, Malayalees and Meat - are what The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond tilts at with quixotic gusto. In the process, it goes completely overboard and loses its way. Propaganda demands no major creative acumen. All it calls for is a willingness to flow with the tide and pass off street-corner tittle-tattle as truth. That is all there is to this film. TKS2, heavy-handed and mealy-mouthed, would have been dismissed as the rant of a fevered mind had it not been so vituperative. The overcooked cinematic harangue proves that while it may be easy to profit monetarily from alarmist postulations, agenda-driven filmmaking can sink quickly and completely into inanity when not backed by solid research and rigour.

An insomniac former police officer, “officially dead” for six years, prowls the streets of Mumbai in the still of the night, killing people in cold blood. Kennedy is his assumed name. The reason, like his deadly deeds, is shrouded in mystery. The taciturn, brooding assassin is out there ostensibly to clean up the mess that politicians, industrialists and gangsters have created. But, in reality, he is the Mumbai police commissioner’s secret loose cannon and hatchet man. That apart, the man, played with coiled-up intensity by a beefed-up Rahul Bhat, has his own reason for being the way he is. He has a score to settle with an elusive crime lord responsible for tearing him away from his family.

Nearly eight years after Tumbbad, Rahi Anil Barve is back with a film that may not be as outstanding as his first film, but it is no less original. Top-lined by Jaaved Jaffery, Mayasabha possesses tremendous visual vigour and a distinctive narrative pace and rhythm. It draws much its power from its uncompromising spirit and crackling energy, enhanced significantly by the actors and the unpredictability of the flow of the tale. It is campy. It is artful. It is pure cinematic insouciance.

A spitfire, Rani Mukerji meets her match in Mardaani 3 in the strikingly vivid form of Mallika Prasad, who slips into the garb of the first female antagonist of the franchise with effortless ease. The frequently electrifying on-screen face-offs between them bring the best out of both performers. In the bargain, the film acquires an edge that is infinitely sharper than that of the two previous films in the series. Mardaani 3 isn’t necessarily any different from all the crusading Singham-style cop movies that Bollywood produces, but it stands apart nonetheless, not just from the crowd but also from its two precursors because of the crackle and clarity of the tale.

Mounted on a grand scale but filmed largely in and around real military locations and installations, Border 2 is a longer, brighter, and more ballistic and variegated replica of the original war drama released in 1997. In tone and texture, however, it isn’t the same. The surface sheen of Border 2 reflects the significant distance that Mumbai’s commercial cinema has travelled in terms of filmmaking technique in the 28-year interregnum. It is bolder and louder than Border could ever have been given the times in which it was envisaged and executed.

For the protagonist and narrator of Taskaree: The Smuggler’s Web, rectitude is heroism. There are other traits, too, that define the Customs officer - courage under fire, bravado in the face of danger, and quick thinking in the midst of systemic sloth. Customs superintendent Arjun Meena (Emraan Hashmi) possesses all the above qualities in abundance, in addition to his ability to lead by example. But nothing is more important to him and his handpicked colleagues than probity. So much so that one team member disowns his family and fiancée because of their failure to understand his principles.

In her fifth outing and first collaboration with actor Sivakarthikeyan, director Sudha Kongara crafts a relevant but way less than scintillating Tamil period drama that, notwithstanding the numerous censorial excisions it has suffered, makes full use of all the ingredients one expects from a star vehicle targeted at a mass audience. The balancing act is by no means easy and Parasakthi frequently teeters on the edge of a pulpy precipice. To her credit, the director, who is also the film’s co-writer with Arjun Nadesan, does not let the commercial aims of the project overly blunt the edges that the emotive subject matter imparts to it.

Not the sort of Bollywood war movie that goes all guns blazing and tom-tomming the virtues of battlefield bellicosity, Ikkis conserves its firepower and spreads it out judiciously over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. The strategy, sustained all the way through, serves Sriram Raghavan’s film, which is a marked departure from his neo-noir thrillers, well. It hits its intended targets more often than it misses.