Rajinikanth’s Coolie, Vijay’s Leo: The second half problem with the cinema of Lokesh Kanagaraj

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Rajinikanth’s Coolie

In Coolie, which tells the story of an ex-coolie who battles against a ruthless smuggling syndicate after the death of his long estranged friend, is a tale that is as old as time. Lokesh uses cliches not as crutches, but as launching pads to delve into typically male worlds and how the past catches up with men who have decided to move on with their lives. The narrative padding and cinematic pleasures in his films come from his visceral filmmaking style, which gets right into the middle of the action and is unafraid to capture the bloodied, uneasy violence as an aesthetic inevitability, rather than a stylistic choice. It is no different in Coolie, but the effort shows, and the fractures in the seamless flow of his action ideas start being redundant here.

Lokesh’s films dwell in worlds where morality and decency are considered flaws that hold people back. For instance, in Leo, a movie about a man who is trying to prove to the world that he is indeed who he claims to be, is a story idea we have all seen umpteen times. An unofficial adaptation of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, this Vijay starrer saw Lokesh using a pretty obvious withholding information tactic as the primary suspense device, even though we all know what Vijay’s ‘Parthiban’ is up to in the film early on. We watch Vijay’s character being put through the wringer, and the hero’s turn to ‘Leo’ becomes the inevitable cathartic release that can make the long wait worth it. But after building up a sparse, economic world of intrigue, the reveal sucks the air out of the goodwill earned by the film’s first half. 

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Vijay’s Leo

The film, which eschews the typical elements we have come to slightly detest in a normal Vijay starrer like the introduction song, relentless punch dialogues, sloppy world building  and invincible hero figure trope, is upended by slow, well-integrated details. The scene where the hero takes on a hyena which runs amok in his snowy hillside town feels like a visual representation of a shady man from the past, who has finally tamed the wild within him for good. The images of ‘Parthiban’ taming the ‘untamable’ beast is a clever, allegorical detail that tells you the kind of world you are being introduced to. Lokesh is happy building up the facade of the hero’s present identity with painstaking detail. The diligence and patience of the setup really pulls you in and you start to root for the hero and his family, even though you are well aware that the inevitable reveal is just around the corner.

Unfortunately, the  long awaited flashbacks show up and it feels like an afterthought and a laboriously strung together stretch, the reveal of which is so clumsily realized that it immediately seals the deal of the film. The generic, complacent details featuring the sacrificial cults, a dead twin sister and weird family history of the hero feels like uninspired strands put together with no conviction. The filmmaker’s straining for novelty begins to show and you wonder at how a film that started off so well plunged itself into such morbid mediocrity. The attention to detail, information delivery methods used in the former half and slickly conceived buildup is sacrificed at the altar of a reveal that feels like a first draft leftover. This plot turn is where people consolidated the rushed, shabby ‘second half theory’ for Lokesh, but the strenuous schedules and deadlines for the star vehicle (self confessed from his interviews) cut him some slack during that discourse.

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Vijay’s Master

There was always a suspicion with the way his previous collaboration with Vijay in Master turned out. The film, which arguably had one of the most effectively considered arcs for a villain in a mainstream Indian movie in a long time, lost its charm in the latter half.  Master started off tracing the history of the villain and you get a chunk of the film dedicated to the method to the madness propagated by ‘Santhanam’ played by Vijay Sethupathi. You rarely get mainstream cinema to examine the interiority of the antagonist and give him  a chance to one up the hero in many instances. But by the second half, Lokesh sprints restlessly to generic action beats and dilutes the inciting incident of the death of two boys that prompted the hero’s redemption. The stark fall in quality in the latter half is painfully obvious as you see the generic template taking over with the shirtless hero and villain fighting it out. All the nuance and character flavor are all thrown out in hopes of fan service by the end.

Kamal Haasan’s Vikram

There is a clear make-it-as-we-go edge to his works in general, where you see small ideas and information from previous scenes coming back to inform the larger picture, like in arguably his best film yet, Vikram. His artistic choices met the right kind of material in the Kamal Haasan-starrer, and Lokesh was able to balance his auteurial signatures without being overtly self referential. A reference or throwaway line rendered by characters in a different context, takes on a whole new meaning in a different scene. Vikram held up as a singular piece of work as the scaffolding of the basic narrative held up consistently. It was able to withstand the addition of his signature elements like retro song placements, LCU connect and his Lokesh touches, without it looking tacked on.

We watch Lokesh Kanagaraj films for his slightly tongue in cheek irreverence to formulaic storytelling rhythms, He captivates and holds your interest with the way he packs little motifs, scene ideas and structural devices within a fairly mundane, familiar setup. So the execution of these beats is as important, if not more than the story itself. He works well with the action genre conventions but elevates age old tropes with his slick, muscular filmmaking style. 

It’s a vibes based filmmaking philosophy that prioritizes pop novelty over considered interiority. He might forgo basic filmmaking grammar like cutting across the ‘180 degree axis’, use odd framing compositions and shot design, like the interrogation scene in Vikram between Fahad Faasil and Narain where the camera flips the 180 degree rule many times over. Or the way he uses his camera in many scenes. But the stories get more and more convoluted as he fleshes them out and the scenes become mere placeholders for interesting ideas lost in translation.

So his action films tend to focus on the structure of events rather than the events themselves to drive the narrative. In Coolie, the second half is where the movie becomes too self obsessed and expects too much from the audiences by introducing a bunch of new characters and digressions to follow. The second half of Coolie becomes densely populated but doesn’t get across any coherent sense of world building, you sit back and watch as characters get killed, betrayed and double crossed, but the writing is so generic and uninspired that not one idea gets through. The main villain of the piece, Nagarjuna becomes a mere footnote till the end, where he is reintroduced to the story, a little too late.

This hyper busy, hyper dense style of second halves are also a result of rushed production schedules, release date deadlines and star interferences. But the fact that a successful filmmaker, with an enviably popular filmography like Lokesh Kanagaraj is not able to find ways to tell a fully competent story with all the resources and technicians at his disposal is a bad sign for our blockbuster cinema. Films are not media to be enjoyed in ‘halves’, audiences deserve a fully competent story from start to finish and the inconsistent storytelling tendency forces viewers to examine films from the prism of halves, as opposed to one single film, as it should be.