Cops and crooks have for decades been action movie staples. They allow screenwriters little elbow room for originality. So, should you expect anything exceptional from Vettaiyan: The Hunter (the title of the Hindi dub of the Tamil police drama released nationwide, riding on Rajinikanth’s mega pan-India appeal)?
Orbiting within and around the formulaic, writer-director TJ Gnanavel assembles a few novel thematic elements and gives them a reasonable shot in Vettaiyan. The outcome may be a tad erratic in terms of pace and emphasis but, overall, what the film pieces together is not all forgettable.
It has clearly emerged from a mind that has urgent questions and is not afraid to pose them in as many words as are needed. At least a few of the notes that Vettaiyan: The Hunter strikes, even when it tends to err on the side of preachiness, are both relevant and subversive.
The film delivers dollops of the chestnuts that one is accustomed to in a Rajinikanth vehicle, but it seeks to invest the exercise with an ethical core aimed at creating a context for the thorny choices a superintendent of the Tamil Nadu Police employs in the line of duty to emerge as a ruthless encounter specialist.
Nishana lagaya toh shikaar pakka (rough translation: when I take aim, I hit), SP Athiyan (Rajinikanth), posted in Kanniyakumari, says after every kill that he scores, which is every time he cocks a pistol and pulls the trigger. He never misses his target, or so he thinks.
Justice Satyadev (Amitabh Bachchan) has other ideas. He abhors extra-judicial killings. He represents a standpoint that is at complete variance with SP Athiyan’s approach to law enforcement. The two worldviews collide in Vettaiyan.
Criminals deserve no mercy, says the police officer. The answer to lawlessness cannot be more lawlessness, asserts the legal luminary, who we first see in the film’s opening sequence delivering an address to new police recruits on “ensuring human rights through law”. Does anybody remember the last time “policing” and “human rights” jostled for space in a single sentence in an Indian movie?
Vettaiyan: The Hunter is a multi-starrer that brings together one male megastar each from the Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi movie industries. The mercurial Fahadh Faasil, whose entry scene in the film is placed ahead of Rajinikanth’s typically swaggering advent, plays a wisecracking, wily ex-conman who works as the hero’s most trusted intelligence-gatherer.
The tall, strapping Rana Daggubati is the physical antithesis of both Rajinikanth and Fahadh Faasil. The character he plays is at an end of the moral spectrum that is diametrically opposite to the one represented by SP Athiyan and his all-weather troubleshooter, Patrick alias Battery (Faasil).
And of course, there is Bachchan, with his baritone accentuated for the occasion, as the sagacious sounding board in a film about the tyranny of the system that has been released nationwide the day before his 82nd birthday and which marks his onscreen reunion with Rajinikanth 33 years after Hum.
The women in Vettaiyan do get their share of the action, nobody more so than Ritika Singh as a rookie cop who learns the ropes from the best in the business. Manju Warrier plays SP Athiyan’s wife, a woman who does a live cooking show but is a terrific markswoman to boot. She demonstrates her skills with the gun when thugs sneak up on her while she sleeps at home.
Also central to the plot is a schoolteacher (Dushara Vijayan, seen in the last three years in films helmed by Pa Ranjith and Dhanush), whose decisions and actions propel much of the action in Vettaiyan.
Talking of action, there is no dearth of it in this film. While parts of Vettaiyan might seem to be in the same zone as Jailer, the film is markedly different from last year’s box-office smash hit in one significant way: it has Rajinikanth in “action star” mode dishing out devastation and death with aplomb.
In Jailer, the superstar was a puppeteer who orchestrated the violent strikes against the baddies. Here, he assumes the garb of a one-man squad and plunges into the action himself. Rajini fans may not any reason to complain, but from the perspective of the narrative veracity, Rajinikanth would probably have done much better had he played his age.
Gnanavel’s script, co-written by B. Kiruthika, casts its net beyond the question of the (im)morality of fake police encounters staged to mete out punishment to those perceived as criminals. It addresses class and caste prejudice in the policing system, distortions in the education system that favour the economically and socially privileged and corruption in the ranks of forces charged with dispensation of justice to the weaker sections of society.
About 30 minutes in, until which point Vettaiyan is fully and unwaveringly focused on inveigling the Rajinikanth fanbase, gathers some momentum. It sustains itself until the intermission, with the takedowns of a couple of hoodlums and a brutal rape and murder that sets off a chain of events that stains SP Athiyan’s enviably spotless record.
Post-interval, Athiyan is in danger of turning into a full-blow series of declamatory sequences designed to raise and answer questions related to a grave miscarriage of justice. Aspersions are rightly cast on the questionable methods that the protagonist resorts to in his pursuit of lawbreakers that he believes are in cahoots with politicians and bureaucrats.
At one crucial juncture, SP Athiyan realises that he has crossed the line of acceptable behaviour. By way of repentance, he gets down in right earnest, with a bit of coaxing from Justice Satyadev, to the task of making amends for an irreversible damage done to the future of an already grievously wronged and disadvantaged family trying to make its way out of poverty through the means of education.
Gnanavel, as he amply demonstrated in Jai Bhim, has a clear take on the world that he lives in, a world where biases run deep and the dispossessed stand next to no chance of turning the tables on an insensitive, exploitative system controlled by the wealthy and the powerful.
Although he does not lose any opportunity to make the most of Rajnikanth’s persona, gait and crowd-pleasing mannerisms, Gnanavel isn’t motivated by commercial considerations alone. He derives enormous purchase from the expose that the film is of a rotten education system that seeks profits from those that, like everybody else, nurture dreams of liberation but, unlike the more fortunate, lack the means to fund them.
Vettaiyan is a Rajnikanth film all the way but it is by no means only for fans of the Thalaivar. It talks about issues that matter and it has Fahadh Faasil in sparkling form. The film turns to the actor – he is way more than just the icing on the cake – when it sputters or gets bogged down by overt moralistic posturing. He delivers without missing a beat.
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