Coolie Review

As one of the hottest names in the Tamil film industry, Lokesh Kanagaraj enjoys a degree of trust from both his cast and his audiences that few filmmakers do. After the success of Kaithi (2019), he doubled down on the hyper-masculine action genre with Vikram and Leo, even building up his own cinematic universe, the "Lokiverse". The problem is that this goodwill now seems to be taken for granted.

It is nearly impossible to narrate Coolie's story without also engendering a general sense of confusion and an involuntary desire to pull one's hair. The broad strokes are easy enough to grasp (good guy, bad guy, in-need-of-rescue lady). Deva (Rajinikanth) clashes with Simon (Nagarjuna), the Bacchanalian ringleader of a port-based smuggling operation, and the latter's unhinged henchman Dayal (Soubin Shahir), who may have been behind the murder of Deva's best friend, Rajasekhar (Sathyaraj). Deva emerges from his quiet, obscure life as the owner of a men's hostel to infiltrate the smuggling ring and exact revenge for Raja's death. He is also doing it for the benefit of Rajasekhar's young daughters, particularly the eldest, Preethi (Shruthi Hassan), who tags along for the ride into the belly of the beast.

Ostensibly a story about brotherhood and vengeance, Coolie is so consumed with the business of Superstar Rajinikanth that the narrative mutates into a distorted version of itself, riddled with loopholes and warped characters. The screenplay lazily leans on our meta-understanding of the cast, pushing the story forward in ways that ignore natural character evolution. Deva is trusted purely on Rajinikanth's merit, the character arrives fully formed as a folk hero without the need for a backstory, and when we finally get the flashback, it is too little, too late. By the second half, the plot collapses so spectacularly, it feels as if an entirely different writer, perhaps Lokesh's evil twin, had taken over.

Dayal, played with gusto by Malayalam character actor Soubin Shahir, is introduced as a ruthless leader of the labourers and Simon's right-hand man. Within the first five minutes, he goes from handling smuggled luxury watches, dressed like a fisherman haggard from a weeklong voyage at sea, to publicly executing an underling in front of his peers. Shahir plays Dayal with a delicious showmanship and edge reminiscent of Fahadh Faasil's bald-headed, psychotic cop in Pushpa. Sadly, much like Faasil in that film, Shahir is treated like a circus act here, as Dayal's character takes inexplicable turns, made to grovel, guffaw, sweat and dance with the all-consuming earnestness of a true talent wasted.

Lurking at the edges of the narrative is Nagarjuna, playing an atypical villain with his typical lightweight acting ability. He is, admittedly, magnetic when Shahir is having a baller time, fondling a bottle of premium whiskey and gyrating on the "dance floor" of his office, but ask him to yell in Deva's face like a madman, and he gasps it out unconvincingly.

Rajini, meanwhile, has no one to bounce his energy off, leaving him looking strangely lonesome. That is why the one memorable fight scene is when he employs his personable side to teach the young women in a ladies' hostel to fend off goons who have come to kidnap Preethi and her sisters. Shruthi Hassan is meant to be the emotional core of the film, which translates to Preethi doing a lot of crying and screaming for help. But her damsel-in-distress act is unconvincing, as Hassan's natural assertiveness keeps peeking through. Between the miscasting, the missed opportunity in the script to create a rapport between Deva and Preethi, and the actor's distractingly unpolished Telugu dubbing, Shruthi Hassan is a bit of a dud.

Encouraged by Anirudh Ravichander's admittedly kickass background score, Kanagaraj uses every excuse to insert a fight scene. These are choreographed by his longtime collaborators and are perfectly serviceable, but there is nothing here to get the blood pumping.

In a more earnest version of this film Deva could have been a bleeding-heart protagonist, delivering a rousing speech about the dignity of labour and riling up the union into revolt. But except for a brief, late-arriving monologue, Coolie is not even about the coolies. It is a film with no soul. The everyman branding of Rajini's character is just for show, and the film knows it, and in its deception, it fails to engage you on an emotional level.

Ultimately, Coolie is just another in a recent string of "quasi-films" that have hit theatres. A quasi-film is not really a film in the traditional sense, but a big-budget, much-hyped, eventized commercial specimen in which a celebrity actor is strung up like a marionette to perform his old tricks while the narrative crumbles around him like dried-up scat. Recent examples include Thug Life, Leo, Retro and Daaku Maharaj, all products of an unbalanced ecosystem where a few big-name filmmakers soak up the money and rain it down on overpaid actors and over-designed sets.

The goal of a quasi-film is not storytelling, but brand maintenance. And that is exactly what Coolie is - not a work of cinema, but a maintenance job for Kanagaraj's and Rajinikanth's stardom.