Kanguva

Five villages — each having its own behaviour, its own problems, professions, and pursuits. It might sound like Black Panther, but we’ll get there later. There is a foreign invasion that threatens to disturb the status quo of the system. There is a hero who wants to do good by his land and his people, and there are external forces that won’t let him do this simple thing that heroes have been doing from time immemorial. There is a Game of Thrones-esque setting, in not just for claiming the top spot, but also in the overall look and feel. There is a timeline jump of almost 1000 years, and the way these two timelines come together is straight out of the SS Rajamouli playbook. Amidst all these familiar tropes lies Siva’s Kanguva that revels in its familiarity, impresses in its visuals, but leaves a lot to be desired in the execution of it all.

Its ambition is sky-high. Kanguva seeks to derive power from the elements (wind, water and fire), the ambitious merger of two timelines separated by a millennium, and the immense magnetism of lead actor Suriya. Nothing wrong with that of course, but the building blocks would have come together far more effectively had the writing and treatment been more organised and coherent.

The story of Kanguva has a lot of similarities with SS Rajamouli’s Magadheera (2009), which laid the foundation for the Telugu icon to make Baahubali: The Beginning. The Ram Charan-starrer is about a street bike race, who realises that he is a reincarnation of an ancient warrior who couldn’t join hands with his love of life. He meets her again in the new life, but the villain of yore is also born again. So, the old scores get settled in an entertaining watch. In Kanguva, the romance gets replaced by a father-son bond only that the son and the father are not related by blood but much stronger drama.

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.

A Roman general, in a bid to expand his base, ventures out into the open sea with his army. Before you think you have inadvertently clicked the link to the review of Gladiator 2, fret not; this is how Kanguva begins. The fascinating story of director Siva’s Kanguva stretches from a legendary island’s hills to the sandy shores of Goa; it even transcends time as its proceedings occur in two different timelines. But whether they amalgamate to make for an intriguing watch is a different question altogether.

Sometime last month, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York took the internet by storm. The prize was a modest 50 dollars. Some participants were more convincing than others, but the reason this event went viral is because the real Chalamet made a surprise visit in the end to greet the winners. Ironically, he looked nothing like the men trying to ape him. The point of this anecdote — wait for it — is that the entire Indian fantasy-period-action-epic bubble these days is an expensive look-alike contest. During the interval of Kanguva, I was momentarily disoriented: was the second half of Devara: Part 1 or Kalki 2898 AD going to start playing? Would anyone even notice? These movies resemble each other in strange and amateur ways, but none of them resemble the original star, S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali. In fact, like Chalamet himself, Rajamouli showed up in a cameo in one of these films — and that scene alone became more popular than the mega-budget production surrounding it.