Readers Write In #709: Rant about Indian 2 – Varma Kalai effectively used against us, the audience!

By Bharath Vijayakumar

I walked in to watch Indian 2 pretty much aware that I am not going to like it. If anything, the trailer was enough of a warning. Most times, when you walk into a film with this frame of mind, you hardly get disappointed. Even the bare minimum would work, and you often feel ‘wasn’t as bad as expected’! And with the kind of names involved with this film, I kind of thought that even if the film isn’t going to work for me, it surely would have some moments to enjoy. And yeah, the first such moment was the interval!

I no longer buy into the ‘supposed noble intentions’ of these larger-than-life movies, having a hero with a ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude, and who goes about killing people in between trips to exotic places and dancing with bikini clad women. Ok, so it may not be appropriate to have Senapathy alias ‘Indian Thaatha’ groove with bikini clad women. So how do we compensate? Simple! Have the villain do it. And this scenario is the hero introduction scene of Indian 2. Siddharth asks ,‘Thaatha ippo Taipei la enna pannitu irupaaru?’ and we get these bikini clad women out of nowhere and a villain who has a fetish of placing turtles on their navel. And the worst is yet to come. This is just some 20 odd minutes into the film, and you have Senapathi, an iconic character in Tamil cinema, mouthing something that literally means, “Weren’t you playing with the navel of these girls. I am now going to pierce your navel with a knife”. And no! I am not kidding! And with that atrocious prosthetic makeup, I wondered if this is Indian 2 or Tamil Padam 3! The film is easier to endure and even mildly enjoyable if you consider it to be the latter.

The crux of Indian 2 does have enough meat. It is about Senapathy returning back to India and asking the youngsters to do exactly what he did in the original Indian. To not turn a blind eye to the mistakes being done by our friends and family. And when these youngsters decide to follow his footsteps, they realize they aren’t going to be praised for being a hero but are rather going to be thrown away by their families for exposing them. This has potential for some solid drama and can give rise to enough conflicts to keep us engaged. But almost all of this happens very late into the film, and for the most part, we have random scenes and random lectures.

The biggest downer of Indian 2 is that we never really get to see Kamal Haasan! The novelty of the 1996 film was that we had a Kamal Haasan in his early 40s play someone who was near his 80s. Here that novelty is lost, and to make things worse, the prosthetic makeup in this film leaves you wondering if there wasn’t even one person in the team who said that this isn’t going to work and is actually laughable! Saw a post in FB (link shared below the article) about how whenever Kamal donned multiple roles with numerous makeovers, there was always the regular Kamal on screen to balance things out and also to register that we are watching a Kamal Haasan film! This feeling never comes in Indian 2. There is so much to rant about the film, but I never ever imagined that a Kamal Haasan portrayal/performance will make me squirm in my seats. Indian 2 achieves this with aplomb. I might not have seen literally every Kamal Haasan performance but those scenes where he kills those North Indian villains employing different kinds of Varmam could easily be the top contender for one of the worst scenes of his career so far. And why shoot in a different language and then have it dubbed in Tamil. Each time Senapathy uses his Varma Kalai, it is Vadivelu’s voice that comes to mind, ‘Oh Korali Vithaiya’!

And what message is the film actually trying to give? The common man benefitting from the welfare schemes of the government is equated to corruption! And when the hero is talking about how people who used to scribble on the walls of public toilet are now writing nonsense in social media using anonymity, we are shown a group of youngsters who are groomed a certain way with a certain hairstyle. With the kind of stereotyping these films do, I guess it is the makers who need lectures and not us, the audience.

Forgetting all this, the film isn’t the least bit engaging. Zero tolerance says the tagline. Zero tension would be more apt. There is not one nail biting scene. What is the modus operandi of the hero? He keeps showing up directly and killing people. With all the types of Varmam they keep talking about, they could have easily just told that there is another Varmam which can transport the hero directly to where he wishes to be. And in case all this unintended humour did not work out and you were imagining yourself to be a participant in ‘Siricha Pochu’ and restraining your laughter, we have Bobby Simha and his team of police to defeat you!

Why does the Senapathy character say ‘Meow’ towards the climax? Was it a symbolic of the cat and mouse game that is going to follow between Senapathy and the police? I was only thankful at this point for the police not retorting by squeaking like a mouse. The makers of Indian 2 have effectively employed a 3-hour Varmam to hurt the audience. Senapathy who hurts the Bobby Simha character promises to cure him by using a counter Varmam. This is supposed to happen in part 3. Hopefully Indian 3 cures the audience as well for what we had to endure with Indian 2!

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