Thug Life (Tamil) Review

Over time, a film often lives on in memory as a collection of iconic scenes: Jack and Rose at the bow of the Titanic; Godfather Michael Corleone at the baptism praying as his enemies are assassinated; Velu Naicker in Nayakan, asked by his grandson whether he's a good man or a bad one. If the lasting impact of a film is measured by the impression its scenes leave behind, then Thug Life - the long-awaited reunion of Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan nearly four decades after their smash-hit Nayakan - is a one-day film: instantly forgettable.

A vague sense of familiarity permeates this gangster action drama. Maybe that is because all mafia stories seem to recycle the same beats: feuding gangs, assassinations, double-crossings, shootouts. In Thug Life, Kamal Haasan plays Rangaraya Sakthivel, a real estate mafia don who grows increasingly suspicious of his inner circle, in particular of Amar (Silambarasan/Simbu), his right-hand man. A simmering jealousy leads to a rivalry that threatens to leave only one man standing.

Even setting aside the narrow playing field that mafia stories often give filmmakers - perhaps because of the long shadow cast by The Godfather, which Kamal Haasan too couldn't resist copying in Nayakan - Thug Life feels boxed in by genre clichés, delivered without even a hint of reinvention. Car chases. Funerals. Point-blank shots to the head. A man rises from the backseat with a revolver aimed at the driver. Someone gets shoved off a ledge. A bomb levels a house. Where the tropes pile up into eye-roll-inducing boredom is that beaten-to-death montage in which a man on the brink of death gets picked up by Tibetan monks and nursed back to life.

The film's limpid story is a baffling misstep for a director of Mani Ratnam's stature. Then you look at the credits and spot Kamal Haasan's name as Writer. As the origin story of Thug Life goes, this was Haasan's story, later shaped by the director, both of whom share the writing credit. As such, that familiar self-mythologizing instinct surfaces in the dialogues - the kind of moment every superstar wants, where his character says something grand that also serves as a statement about his real-life persona. In Thug Life, it takes the form of an allusion: Kamal Haasan may be old, but he's still the king of cinema and won't be so easily replaced by young blood. Or at least, that's the subtext. And it's hard not to read between the lines.

Mani Ratnam's exquisite filmmaking sensibility shines only in brief, fleeting bursts. The charged scenes between Sakthivel and Indrani, a dancing girl who becomes his mistress, to the dismay of his wife Jeeva (played impressively by Abhirami), carry that signature glint of mischievous romance that is Ratnam's wheelhouse. But those moments are tantalizingly few. Trisha is scintillating as Indrani. She and Kamal Haasan share such crackling chemistry that you spend the rest of the film hoping for their scenes alone. Instead, the movie sets off on a vengeance track with a predictability that bores.

Thug Life feels like a work of compromise. An uneasy marriage between Mani Ratnam's timeless sensibilities and contemporary cinema's diminished state as a vehicle for fan service and star power. Which might explain the film's Delhi setting, if only to chase some vague pan-India appeal. Or its many tired commercial clichés like the hero's entry scene set to rousing background music, executed in such a dated style that it belies Mani Ratnam's unease with them. Simbu swivels his car dramatically into frame in a slow-mo entry shot - haven't we seen that a million and a half times already? The compromises go beyond tone and treatment and right into the story beats, which leave the film feeling uneven, as if entire storylines were left on the cutting room floor, and emotionally bankrupt.

Even the technicals waver under the weight of the narrative. A R Rahman's score is transcendent when the story holds, but feels jarringly out of place when it's laid over weaker moments. That's why "Anju Vanna Poove" resonates so powerfully in the film's well-crafted opening scenes when a tragedy orphans a young Amar and he gets picked up by Sakthi, while "Sugar Baby" - a slick, sexy number that Indrani sings out of nowhere - feels like a distracting interlude. Ravi K Chandran's cinematography follows a similar pattern: it adds richness to the strong early sequences but feels merely functional, even flat, in the poorly-lit, commercial-style portions that follow.

As an actor, Kamal Haasan reminds us that few can match his range. He embodies the gravitas of a don as effortlessly as the mischief and vulnerability of a doting husband. But when it comes to writing - perhaps it's best left to the professionals.

Simbu suffers from an underwritten role. He is already an actor of a stoic temperament, and his character Amar's thinly sketched arc becomes the film's Achilles' heel. The story sorely lacks scenes that explore Amar's interiority and his inner conflict with Sakthivel, without which the narrative feels wobbly. Later, his crucial showdown with Indrani lands as an all-around awkward affair.

Ultimately, the failure of Thug Life may be business as usual for an actor like Kamal Haasan. But for Mani Ratnam, one of India's greatest auteur filmmakers, it feels more like a reckoning. That he can deliver a misfire even after the grandeur of Ponniyin Selvan is not a reflection of fading talent; the brilliance is still there. And of course, no one expects a master to never fail. But when the failure comes not from bold experimentation but from imitation and creative stagnation, the disappointment feels especially disheartening.