Coolie

Superstar Rajinikanth’s latest movie Coolie is trash! At least, that’s what the general consensus among reviewers seems to be. There are reports about falling footfalls, defying earlier expectations of it becoming Tamil cinema’s 1000-crore grosser. But if we set aside these endless discussions about ticket sales — which, let’s face it, none of us have any stake in — our financial fate won’t change, no matter how many crores the movie makes. Why would we give even a two-hoot about a film’s commercial success? That’s a discussion for another day. Coming back to Coolie, I initially refused to read any reviews or listen to anyone’s opinions. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t avoid stumbling upon multiple negative takes. The headlines all said the same thing: “Coolie is a huge disappointment.” “Lokesh Kanagaraj fails to deliver on expectations.” Memes and posts across social media screamed the same.

There are four key pieces of information on the Coolie poster. Above the title: ‘Superstar Rajinikanth’. And below: ‘Written & directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj’, ‘An Anirudh musical’, ‘An Anbariv action’. In the end, the film ends up less than the sum of these imposing parts. It isn’t sterile, it has something of all their personalities, but no one brings their A-game. The film starts with its best idea: Soubin Shahir as the heavy. He plays Dayal, an enforcer at a Visakhapatnam dockyard, responsible for keeping workers afraid and details of his employer’s smuggling racket from leaking out. It’s inspired casting, transforming the mild-looking Malayalam actor into a loathsome sadist. Shahir jumps in headfirst, radiating mean little guy malevolence as he hacks, bludgeons and gurgles psychotically.

Lokesh Kanagaraj is no longer a “young” filmmaker. He’s been around for eight years and six films, and it’s become easy to predict the exact manner in which he works on his screenplays. Back when he introduced the Gatling gun towards the end of the much-loved Kaithi, we didn’t just get one of Tamil cinema’s most exhilarating climaxes, we also got a textbook example of what one can do with a great Chekhov’s Gun. Five films and an artillery later, you’re able to make out the beats of what he’s trying to achieve, hours before his films get there. So when we saw a happy picture of Parthiban/Leo and family feeding their newly domesticated hyena, you could sense that the wild animal would make a return later on in the film. And by the time we hit Coolie, our minds are working overtime when a pointless character walks past a closed door with another pointless character revealing how lethal the inmate of that room is. It may have been a gun in Kaithi, a canon in Vikram, a box and arrow in Master and the Hyena in Leo, but with Coolie, Lokesh has possibly realised that he’s making a film so big that he can now afford to cast a full-time superstar from another industry as his Chekhov’s Gun.

Coolie has no dearth of big stars. It has Aamir Khan in a special appearance as a swaggering, heavily tattooed crime lord who pops out of a chopper in the middle of a desert at the fag-end of the film. Upendra has an extended cameo that kicks of late in the second half when the chips are down for once for the titular protagonist. Nor is that all. Nagarjuna Akkineni dons the garb of the principal villain and Soubin Shahir slips into the skin of a slimy double-dealer. It’s top-heavy, to say the least. Each one of them carries his weight in Coolie-The Powerhouse (the title of the Hindi dub of the Tamil action extravaganza that’s been released without the suffix). But it is hardly surprising that the onus of doing most of the heavy lifting in squarely upon the redoubtable Rajinikanth.