'Thug Life' review: 'Nayakan' this is not; Kamal Haasan's emotionally unfulfilling film suffers from a serious case of identity confusion

The most dominant and recurring motif in some of Mani Ratnam's best films is the collision of two opposing forces, either in the form of individuals with opposing ideologies — it could be between a father and a son, between a wife and a husband, between two brothers, or even between a man and his conscience. But what happens when Mani Ratnam makes a film where two different narratives and two different storytelling approaches collide, resulting in something that leaves a bitter taste?

Look, there is enough in Thug Life that makes it worthy of a long discussion. How many commercial masala entertainers of today can we say that of? Let's take the monochrome opening portions of Thug Life, set in 1994. For the 90s kid in me, it transported me to that time when I discovered a cool filmmaker called Mani Ratnam whose films looked and sounded different from those of other Indian filmmakers of the time.

Thug Life offers some images familiar to those who have seen Nayakan numerous times. There is the kid who becomes an orphan due to an accident that indirectly involves Kamal Haasan's character, Sakthivel, who is named after the character he played in Nayakan, a film that was — and continues to be — regarded as a groundbreaking masterpiece. For the sake of clarity, I'll be using 'Sakthivel 2.0' to refer to Kamal's character in Thug Life from here on.

Thug Life opens with a voiceover reminiscent of a line in Nayakan about a man making peace with death. So, both Sakthivels have that in common. Death follows them wherever they go. Not surprisingly, we get slight variations of scenes from the 1987 classic. There is a son who lost his father and now seeks vengeance, but this time there is a Shakespearean twist. There is a young woman who believes she is an orphan (remember Karthika who led her cop husband to believe she is an orphan?). There is a husband telling his wife that he'll kill her if she cries (remember the Nayakan scene where Kamal tells Saranya to cry?). There is Sakthivel 2.0 telling his brother Manickam (played by Nasser) that he once "killed a cop with an iron pipe." There is a scene where Sakthivel 2.0 learns that his daughter has named her son after him. There is a woman who is rescued from a dance bar. There may even be a Chandni Bar tribute here: when the same woman shares that it was her uncle who sold her to a brothel. (I'm not sure if there was a similar line in Nayakan.) There is a young cop whose father, also a cop, shared a violent history with Sakthivel 2.0.

Unlike Nayakan, Thug Life is set in Delhi, and there is a reason for this. It has to do with the violent history of the place which is brought up when a man tells another why he suspected him of being a traitor. Speaking of traitors, a gangster drama wouldn't be one without an ample amount of double-crosses. Sakthivel 2.0 also encounters both internal and external threats. He is essentially the Julius Caesar figure in Thug Life. When the adopted son, Amaran (played by Silambarasan), suggests that they expand their empire by making certain choices with which the older man is uncomfortable, perhaps we can draw parallels about the need for filmmakers and actors from an older era to adapt to the times.

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And Mani Ratnam has always been looked at as a filmmaker open to innovative ideas and understanding the pulse of young and urban audiences. He is not always successful, though. There are only a few times when you went to have a biryani and got exactly that, with all the necessary condiments that go with it. Sometimes you went to have a full biryani and got a single one instead. Sometimes you went to have a single biryani and got kuska — minus the condiments. Thug Life belongs to the third category.

Where do I begin? There is, maybe, 40 per cent of Thug Life that's quite solid — and most of it is the pre-interval segments — when the film remains in gangster movie mode, with some tense sequences. I also think Thug Life has the best action sequences of all the recent Mani Ratnam films, despite not offering anything we haven't seen before. (I'm glad that we don't have the jittery camera from Raavanan.) One train station fight, for instance, may have been influenced by Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster.  

However, once we reach post-interval, the film reveals other, strange inclinations. Let's just say that it sometimes wants to be Nayakan 2.0 at others, Batman Begins and John Wick. Maybe it also wants to be Indian 1.5. Without giving anything away, there is a moment in Thug Life where Mani Ratnam repeats an idea from Roja, which he had also used in Kaatru Veliyidai. However, given the rushed quality of the whole transition process, we never quite feel the impact of this new "superhuman" phase of Sakthivel.

It's why I would say Thug Life seems designed for a post-Vikram audience rather than a pre-Nayakan audience, a quality that works to its detriment. There was a time when Mani Ratnam made films with a neat balance between the arthouse and commercial cinema ingredients. With Thug Life, though, the problem is that we never quite feel closer to any of the characters or relationships that we are supposed to get sentimental about — which was not the case with Nayakan. That film appealed to both the heart and the intellect. Thug Life, on the other hand, seems like a pale imitation of Nayakan — or any of the Hollywood action films it was possibly trying to emulate — and ends up not having its own unique identity.

Film: Thug Life

Director: Mani Ratnam

Cast: Kamal Haasan, Silambarasan, Abhirami, Trisha, Joju George, Ashok Selvan, Nasser

Rating: 2/5

 

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