Don’t get me wrong. Rajinikanth is… Rajnikanth. No matter what he plays, and how, he is on top of the game. In saying this, there is no shame. This time, he is Deva, a mysterious man from the past, having a blast saving Shruti Haasan (who gets pushed around and beaten all through) from the clutches of an unimaginably vicious villain played with a disturbing creepiness by Soubin Shahir.
The dockyard becomes a playground for criminal activities, as Simon (Nagarjuna) and his henchman Dayal (Soubin Shahir) unleash a reign of terror, broken by a very silly, totally out of place item song featuring Pooja Hegde, called ‘Monica’.
Anirudh Ravichander’s music, which is weak anyway, is further mauled in translation. Do humanity a favour: when doing dubbed Hindi versions of Telugu films, please leave the songs alone. Translated, the songs sound like the the Hanuman Chalisa in Hebrew.
Did the above paragraph sound like a distraction? That’s how it feels to have Ms Hegde dancing on the dock(girl harbour?). There are quite a number of clunky episodes in the first half. An electric chair which disposes of murdered bodies without a trace , plays a leading part in the first half as Deva (Rajinikanth) takes on Simon and his right-hand man Dayal.
Later, another prominent female character joins in to form a triumvirate of pure evil.
Sadly, the villains are more interesting in Lokesh Kanagraj’s explosive screenplay than the heroes. Ironically superstar Rajinikanth’s character seems unfinished. He arrives to save his old friend’s daughters from the clutches of the villains. We are shown a picture of a very young Rajini and Shobana who once were married.
Maybe more on that the next time? Yes, there is a sequel implied at the end when Aamir Khan saunters into the frames in a three-quarters pants, twirling moustache and twinkling eyes. Aamir finally brings to the table what is tragically lacking in the rest of the film: a sense of humour.
Rajini tries to blend action with humour, daroo and mara-mari in his introductory song (again an awful literal translation). But his sense of the absurd is not sharp enough to cut through the chase, mainly due to the undeveloped writing in the first-half.
The entire meat of the matter is in the second half when the plot finally makes the right moves, blood spills, and the chases, especially the one which ends with Shruti Haasan being hunted down in a train by the ominously omnipresent Soubin Shahir, are edge-of-the-seat. The second half is decidedly more gripping, and the characters seem to finally find their groove.
Coolie is a lot of fun, much more than the other releases this week. Its action and drama post midpoint is pure adrenaline, tempting us to ignore some of the earlier ungainliness. Lokesh Kanagaraj has an exacerbated sense of mass entertainment which tends to get unwieldy. He draws in the narrative’s breath just in time to suck us into the plot.
By the time Aamir walked in, smoking guns and all, I was cheering for the next instalment.
Bring it on.
