Director: Sundar C
Cast: Vishal, Tamannah, Aishwarya Lekshmi, Ramki
‘Action’, with all its pre-release promotional material and trailers promised a science bending, car thumping and death-defying film from the word go. I would say that the film didn’t disappoint on any of these particular counts. The action sequences are choreographed to great detail and shot (by ace cinematographer George C Williams) to terrific effect. The block just on the verge of the interval, set in London, is especially mind-boggling and adrenaline pumping.
Unfortunately, the makers seem to have completely ignored that there is one other ingredient apart from slick editing cuts and fast camera pans to make an action film truly work-good writing. There is an interesting disclaimer right at the start of the film delivered on video by Vijay Sethupathi (in a guest appearance). We are told that since the film’s script travels extensively from India, across Asia and to Europe, all characters have been programmed to deliver their dialogues in Tamil, just for the sake of convenience. It would have been really helpful if he had added another line to this advisory, asking us to leave our brains at home as we travel along with these characters!
The main character in question is Kernel Subash (Vishal), who hails from a powerful political family in south India- his father is the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. The villain is Syed Malik (played by Kabir Singh), who calls himself an NRI- a Non-Reliable Indian and whose character seems to be modeled on a prominent underworld don from the real world. Syed is currently holed up in Pakistan, a country that has given him safe haven in return for large sums of money.
The core plot involves a major terror incident at a large political rally, which sees the demise of senior political figureheads and more affectingly, people close to Subash. He loses his love interest Meera (played by Aishwarya Lekshmi who has superb screen presence and a promising career ahead) and also his brother (Ramki) who was next in line to take over the party reigns. What’s worse, the blame for this incident is pinned squarely on his brother and it is now left to Subash to wade through the murky trail of conspirators, assassins and global terrorists to avenge his loss and absolve his brother of these charges.
I’m all for films that indulge a little with sequences that defy the laws of physics to add entertainment value. But what I find impossible to accept is incompetent writing. In fact, some of the writing is so lazy and preposterous here that you really question how senior actors like Vishal and Tamannah would even sign on for such a project. I could give you countless examples, but take this one scene for instance in Istanbul where Subash has to retrieve some information from a particular character’s bank account. This whole sequence, that involved casually nicking a large bank’s server room key from the Head of Security (really?!) and smart-talking the bank manager into logging in to the system using his ‘admin’ password was just mind-numbing and hilarious to say the least! The dialogues in general are extremely pedestrian right through the film too and you could almost second guess the lines before they are delivered by the actors on screen.
Even the one last chance for redemption is blown away by the writers. There is a sequence right at the end, clearly inspired by films like Argo and Akshay Kumar’s Baby, that could have been edge of the seat stuff if executed with conviction and seriousness. But even this goes south, thanks to some illogical staging and writing, which by this time we unfortunately come to expect from this film. In between all this, there’s also a bunch of mediocre and forgettable songs from HipHop Tamizha that somehow find their way into the script from time to time. By this point though, we don’t really care as the script has already hit such a low that things couldn’t really get any worse!
In one of the scenes in the film where Subash hacks into the bank account of one of the conspirators, he not only downloads all the information he needs but also transfers all the money that this character owes back to a bank in India, in a leap of patriotic sentiment. I could not help the thought that some of that money should have been transferred to my bank account as well, for having paid for the tickets and popcorn and sat through this film in its entirety!
Overall rating: 1/5
