Readers Write In #817: Murder Caesar – a Thug Life not earned

By Srinath Lalgudi

As I thought about headline options for this piece, I went through the myriad thoughts & emotions this movie created in me and the one word that stood out again and again was – ‘Unearned’. Starting from what this movie wanted to make the audience feel and ending with the deluge of exaggerated social media hate it is receiving.

I know KH has said this was based on his script that MR took inspiration from and reimagined. But after watching this movie, this is what I think happened – 

KH wanted to make a movie like Kill Bill (which may end up being his next one with Anbariv), a stylized martial arts inspired actioner that has an aging don being betrayed by his underlings, only to survive his assassination attempt, recover with brewing vengeance and return to massacre all his attackers. (or ‘Kill’ with mainly kung fu and an Anime vibe)

MR read this, focusing mainly on the betrayal part that appealed to his EQ, thought what if the ‘baba mar gaya’ boy from Nayagan was not specially abled and was instead kept alongside the guilty don, eventually encountering emotional turmoil and becoming a self-righteous betrayer which reminded him of Brutus from Julius Caesar and bam! He was hooked due to his penchant for retelling epics.

Kill Bill by KH and Julius Caesar by MR are both movies I would love to see as separate films where they have their respective appropriate tonology to earn the payoffs they want to give viewers. But alas, they tried to make something different just for the sake of being different and decided to mash them together and make ‘Murder Caesar`. They both fall in love with this concept, fresh off their individual successes in the past few years (INDIAN 2 was more a Shankar failure for me) with their respective ages catching up to them, they think this would be a different enough movie to come back together after 38 years.

Thus begins the smashing together of these 2 story blocks and they keep trying to make them stick together with spit, snot, flum, sweat and maybe even a little blood hoping the adhesive powers within these are enough. Unfortunately, just as a doctor cannot diagnose/treat himself, they fail to realise this will not be a successful amalgam as this improvised glue is flaky at best.

The whole time I was watching this film, I couldn’t shake the feeling of watching two completely different films that just had its scenes shuffled and then interleaved again by the director and editor. This split brain nature of things I believe was felt very much by ARR when he saw the film before all of us and his background score reflects his confusion. In his effort to aid the viewer with his music, he inadvertently ends up highlighting the very dissonance he hoped to remove with his melodies. MR says ARR takes care of a lot when he composes a musical landscape for a film, so in this case ARR has tried to unsuccessfully cover up for the director’s faltering plot landscape blindspot.

BR says MR/KH believe in show, don’t tell. I am sorry to say, this movie is very much not that. Almost every needed, important plot detail is mostly told to us, never shown. No payoff is earned. I have listed points below wherein I may suggest cliches as possible solutions but I tried to remain within the scope of what the plot of the movie was trying to convey.

• Did this movie earn the use of its Delhi locale? Mind you, Delhi is not like Mumbai which is more identified with a melting pot and the underworld, especially to your average South Indian resident. How does a man from Kayalpattinam who comes to Delhi at a young age become a big gangster there? Why not bring in someone who has the knowledge to imagine a brief path to show for that character? Someone like, say Anurag Kashyap(no matter the bad blood, I am sure he would have loved to join the next MR-KH venture) or any number of similarly themed underworld web series writers who can provide the info so MR-KH can write it themselves. Unearned!

• Did this movie earn Nasser/Manickkam’s character being almost an Iago(not to cross Shakespearean streams) of sorts to this story? If you meant for him to have such an impact to the plot, why couldn’t a part of the prologue also be used to build the brother’s precarious dynamic along with Amaran’s emotional core. You wouldn’t need Manickkam to spout his emotions before his death if you had just shown it to us before. Unearned!

• Does this movie earn its reason for a big gangster like Chinnavar going to prison? BR appreciated a compressed story told there, I beg to differ as I felt it was a badly underwritten reverse engineered throwaway flashback that showed us only stereotypes/tropes within a closed loop universe. You know this incident is going to lead to a major plot point causing Chinnavar to go away from the business to allow Amaran to take centrestage, leading to the eventual power struggle. Is it not important to properly show this inciting event? The ripples from which even show up in the climax? Unearned!

• Does the movie earn Amaran being liked more than Chinnavar by everyone? Why have Anburaj and Pathros tell us casual out-of-nowhere lines of poisoning the team dynamic and power instead of showing why they have issues with Chinnavar, especially when you have already decided to not show more details about Manickkam? How could you yada-yada Amaran’s side of the story when he is in power so to speak? Unearned!

• Does the movie earn its Chinnavar-Amaran close relationship and eventual betrayal? We never see how close they are, to understand why Amaran would be okay with killing him so easily? For eff’s sake, I had a better albeit one-note understanding of Deepak’s bond with Raanu. We never see Amaran relishing being in power so he can maybe choose to trust the news that Chinnavar knowingly killed his dad and use that as justification for his betrayal. Unearned!

• Does the movie earn its martial arts style action set pieces? To just tell us in a voiceover how monks trained and gave Chinnavar his health, confidence back and kung fu as a bonus and to show nothing of it is a slap to all our collective intellects. The Bodhidharman dialogue is funny as hell that vocalizes our mind-voice, but not when the movie wants us to take the unfolding action as a serious revenge. Unearned!

• Does the movie earn any romance(toxic or forced) between Indrani and Amaran? If you plan for this girl’s relationship with Chinnavar being a thorn in Amaran’s side, why not show Amaran “save” her to be his concubine and she choosing Chinnavar as her ‘type’ leading to more emasculation for Amaran? That way, consuming her is basically part and parcel of killing Chinnavar and taking his place as the head of the gang (Almost an isotope of what is shown in Tumbaad) Why have the beach scene with him professing his undying love for her? Unearned!

• Does the movie earn the Chandra ex machina in the end? You plan her coming to know of her brother minutes before his death as going to be the dramatic tragic arc for Amaran, how can you not show the audience how she is as a person, how being separated away from her brother and having a cop as a guardian has molded her. Her parallel track to Amaran is essential for any emotional heft in the climax. Unearned!

• Does the movie earn any Yakuza references? Are they inspired by the Japanese underworld work ethic?  If you really want to have it in the movie, why not have Chinnavar’s betrayal assassination take place near Mt Fuji where they perhaps go for a partnership opportunity meeting with a Yakuza gang there? So when Chinnavar survives, he could actually maybe become a Yakuza who then comes back for his vengeance. Unearned!

• Last but not the least, does the movie earn Rangaraya Sakthivel being the hero of the story? Even in a movie named ‘Hero’ that this duo previously made, we are not told to see him as a hero. But here he himself tells us he is an immortal hero that death comes for repeatedly but can’t kill. They tried to show it with the unearned action scenes, but how is that matching any preset plot point/theme from the first half. Where is the arc from aging insecure Don to Space Hero? Unearned!

The only moments in the movie that rang true for me were few, but within them was the truly betrayed soul of a movie I would love to watch:

• Chinnavar carrying kid Amaran outside while he confronts the cop

• Chinnavar being a bumbling insecure Don, who is starting to show his age

• Vaiyapuri and Vadivukarasi banter

• Chinnavar and his wife’s banter

• Chinnavar and Amaran meeting in the hospital (as BR said, the scene is not given any time to breathe)

• Chinnavar apologizing to Amaran

• When Chinnavar thinks Amaran has come to save him from being killed in the snow, Amaran almost imperceptibly shakes his head and Chinnavar’s reaction to that. (No words exchanged, pure acting and without doubt the best moment in the movie, reminding us of the MR/KH magic and STR actually matching up to them)

BR mentioned in one of his comment replies about a “salvaged script”. If that is true, if all these unearned aspects of the movie are mostly because of additions after the script was locked leading to just damage control being the final goal when the movie was being put together on the edit table, is that not a complete mismanagement and failure in part of both the artists in question when they are at statures where they have the most control?

Here is where I also start to question the other creative producers Siva Ananth, Shaad Ali, Bejoy Nambiar, Mahendran on this project, did they drink the Kool-Aid and fail MR & KH? 

Perhaps they could have called out their respective emperor but not when there were 2 towering giants/sacred cows amongst them who have previously made unexpected things work beautifully and no one could scream out that they have no clothes on this time around? 

One last thought as I try to bring this rant to an end, paraphrasing here – MR is asked close to the beginning of BR’s interview, “When during the shoot did you realize this movie is finally shaping up the right way” and MR says “if it happens during the shoot it is too late, it has to happen at the idea stage”.

How I wish someone at that stage had stepped up over there and spoken out before it was too late…..sigh…