lineslkp.blogg.se

So on the one hand we follow the sober tale of a soldier in the Indian Army (namely, the Character) who wipes out a significant threat from a terrorist organisation’s sleeper cells, and on the other, we bask in thrills from a hero (namely, the Archetype) who swaggers through this mission in style. In his previous feature, the mostly risible 7-aum Arivu, Murugadoss struggled to find a balance between the demands of the story and the desire to enshrine his hero – but in Thuppakki, he locates the magical mean. For this lack of pandering alone, for refusing to box this film into the tired tropes of an exalted “Tamil” culture, for disregarding the “distributor’s logic” of “B- and C-centre storytelling,” for entrusting into the hero’s hand a Rubik’s cube, the director AR Murugadoss deserves some kind of bravery award. The story unfolds in Mumbai, but the hero and his cohorts aren’t the usual rubes who flail about in an alienating “North India.” They speak Hindi and English when needed, like how people who’ve made their homes elsewhere do – and even the deific name of Vijay’s character, Jagdish, isn’t derived from a Dravidian deity. Thuppakki is a straightforward action movie that, impressively, refuses to dumb itself down. The trick is probably that there’s no high-concept gimmick – echolocation, joined-at-the-hip siblings – that needs dumbing down for the great unwashed masses.

What it sets out to do, it does reasonably well. Big-budget, hero-worshipping Tamil cinema is usually such an unmitigated horror show – you only have to look back at Thaandavam and Maattrraan, this year – that Thuppakki instantly slots itself as some kind of minor classic in the genre.