L2: Empuraan (Telugu) Review

In Lucifer, Mohanlal plays an enigmatic character with many names. He is Stephen Nedumpally, the illegitimate son of Kerala's ex-CM PKR; Khureshi Abr'aam, leader of a shadowy international organization; Mahiravanan, Iblis, and most significantly, Lucifer, the fallen angel of Christianity.

In L2, the visibly extravagant sequel to Lucifer, his list of monikers gets longer: British Intelligence codenames him "Cicada", his rivals call him "Esthappa", and the overbearing background score hails him as "Empuraan", meaning Overlord. Three hours later, all these names still hang in the air like giant question marks, refusing to coalesce into an answer of who Stephen really is. Instead we're told, come back and find out in the next film.

L2 is the second of a trilogy, follow-up to the runaway hit Lucifer that got remade into Telugu as Chiranjeevi's Godfather. L2 picks up five years after Stephen's step-brother Jathin (Tovino Thomas) became the Chief Minister of Kerala and Stephen himself disappeared into the shadows. The politics of the state have soured since. Jathin is so corrupt and so unlike his illustrious father PKR that even his sister Priya (Manju Warrier) is opposed to his latest venture, a check dam project that threatens the very lands that made their family the political heavyweights of Kerala. Jathin cozies up to the crook Baba Bajrangi (Abhimanyu Singh), a politician from the North who has his own devious plans to use Jathin as a pawn. And while this drama plays out at home, bigger forces are at play abroad - drug deals, double-agents, and shootouts involving two major underground power players: an Indo-African nexus named Shen Triad who will loom larger in the third film, and Lucifer Nexus. Lucifer Nexus, of course, being led by Stephen's don avatar Khureshi Abr'aam.

L2 steals liberally from the KGF playbook of endless entry shots and schizophrenic edits of a convoluted script featuring emotionally vacant characters. The aim is not to tell a story, but to shock us into staying in our seats. The gratuitous opening scene is the first taste of what comes later: a massacre and a horrific rape - crude attempts to establish the villany of Baba Bajrangi and his sidekick Munna Bhai, without any real context of their origins.

Amongst the hordes of new characters that drop in and drop out at random are also British Intelligence Officers Michele Menuhin (Caroline Koziol) and her superior Boris Oliver (played by Jerome Flynn of GoT fame) who are trying to nab Khureshi. A job that appears to mean strutting with purpose, talking into earphones, staring slack-jawed at monitor screens and say the spy film tropes like "Who do we have on the ground?" and "Do not engage! I repeat, do not engage!".

Old faces are around, too - politicians of Jathin's party, members of the media channel NPTV etc - but they are sitting ducks serving little purpose in the story other than to be in close-up shots reacting to Jathin's antics.

Most disappointing though is how little we see Mohanlal. Call it a cinematic equivalent of breadcrumbing, but Mohanlal does what amounts to a series of cameos at regular intervals to keep things going. Most of his scenes are of him disembarking from one vehicle or another - usually a helicopter - in a slow-motion entry shot and delivering strained lines after his army of gun-toters, led by his trusted lieutenant Zayed (Prithviraj Sukumaran), have annihilated his enemies. He shows up in Senegal to thwart an armada of drug shipments, in Pakistan to rescue young boys from Islamic militant training, in Iraq to attend a secret rendezvous with a rival organization - and somewhat as an afterthought, in Kerala to do a fan-service scene of hiking up his mundu and beating up some goons.

Manju Warrier's character Priya is marginally better-written but still caricaturish. She transforms from a nervous to a respected leader, although there are many questions about the abrupt and unconvincing way it happens. The leaky plot also never explains why Tovino's character has turned amoral. And Tovino himself seems unsure. Like nearly every actor asked to animate their insipid characters, he too falls short and delivers a performance that is flat and uninteresting.

Run-of-the-mill camera work and some truly egregious production mishaps further sink the quality of the film. In one scene, a journalist Govardhan (Indrajit Sukumaran) who acts as one of the film's narrative devices is taken to meet Stephen who has been in hiding. To keep Stephen's location secret, Govardhan gets drugged, put on a private jet, and dropped seemingly in the middle of nowhere with an IV stuck into his arm and a jug of green juice beside him. But when the camera zooms out it is instantly recognizable as the most famous skyline in the world: Manhattan.

L2: Empuraan is bigger in ways that don't ultimately matter because all its grand ideas crowd out its own hero. L2 may have expanded the playing field, brought in Hollywood actors and shot in fancy locations, but it is hard to remember even one truly satisfying scene. By the end, it feels like a self-serving quest for Prithviraj to elevate himself within the Lucifer universe as the story starts to circle around his character Zayed and his relationship to Khureshi - a question that no one was really curious about in the first place.

L2 is a sorry case of sophomore slump, an anti-sequel that fritters away the goodwill of its predecessor. The intense political succession drama, the magnetism of Mohanlal, the genuine creepiness of Vivek Oberoi's character - all the elements that made Lucifer so unforgettable are tainted by this unworthy circus.