Indian 2: Misguided Attempt At A Spectacle, That Fails Spectacularly

AFTER MORE THAN 30 YEARS, it is common knowledge that Shankar lacks nuance and is prone to exaggeration. All his success is despite those shortcomings and occasionally because of them. But it is still funny to see just how over the top he can get.

Watching his latest film, Indian 2 — the sequel to 1996’s Indian — what caught my eyes (or rather, burnt itself onto my retinas) is how the ultra-rich, billionaire businessmen are presented. They have gold basements the size of museums with gold toilets. One wears necklaces and chains with embellishments too huge for his chest. Another’s pastime is floating in zero gravity. Meanwhile, SJ Suryah’s version drives an expensive car inside his house that resembles the interior of a pinball machine. It is not just a hyperbole; it is caricaturish and unsophisticated for someone with so much money.

But maybe, that is the point. It makes us wonder who really lives like that even when we know that people with that kind of wealth do exist. Then my mind wandered to the tacky wedding celebrations of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant, streamed on news channels and via Instagram Reels, even as this film hit the theatres — just as exaggerated a power move. It didn’t make these moments in the film ring true, it just made them ironic and therefore funnier as to how Shankar could top this orchestrated reality television too.

It might be correct to say that the whole of Indian 2 comes across like an afterthought — only if some thought was put into it in the first place. It is clear Shankar is out of ideas and he admits it himself by reusing moments and references from his older, more successful films. RK Laxman’s Common Man wields a hundred machine guns like in Enthiran (2010). In one scene, Priya Bhavani Shankar yells “panni” when someone pokes her — a Vadivelu tic from Mudhalvan (1999). There is a reference to and actual footage from Sivaji (2007). Indian thatha aka Senapathy (Kamal Haasan) goes live on Facebook and people follow the stream in auditoriums and stadiums as if it is the World Cup finals, a throwback to Anniyan’s (played by Vikram) meet-and-greet in the latter half of the eponymous 2005 film.

The idea of vigilante justice is old and tiresome at this point, and Indian 2 looks like every thought that came into someone’s head was thrown to the wall and made it into the film even if it didn’t stick.

Like the scene with Gulshan Grover — a Vijay Mallya archetype — where the varma kalai supposedly makes him “ladylike”. Even after widespread critique of his writing and depictions in I (2015), did Shankar and his assistants learn nothing? How does something like this make it to a three-hour film that was in the making for six years without a single nay from anyone in the team? Indian 2 is patchwork filmmaking, everything is an extension of an already bad idea. Let’s take varma kalai to an overblown level so that this old man, who is probably north of 90 if not 100, can fight. Let’s extend the already tedious usage of social media and YouTube in Tamil cinema to the extreme. When it comes to action, there is a leap of faith or suspension of disbelief, but it exists within the logic of a certain universe, not merely to fool the audience into submission.

In Indian 2, Siddharth’s Chitra Aravind and his friends run a YouTube channel called Barking Dogs, one among numerous Tamil channels satirising daily news and events. They also double up as part-time activists. It is not clear what they do if Chitra is waiting for his H1B visa (don’t ask). A woman dies by suicide when she is wrongly accused of forging her marksheets and when these activists want to shout murder, they take her body away from her family and sit in protest with the dead woman lying in front of them. There is something grotesque about how the team goes about doing things like that, things that are not alien in a Shankar film.

There is a larger point here about how a channel like Barking Dogs and the people who run such channels are here for the spectacle when the larger purpose of their acts goes out the window and only the performance followed by an apathetic audience liking, sharing and subscribing remains. There is a different film here where there is no Kamal Haasan or Indian thatha at all. What happens to Barking Dogs? Can they walk the talk, or do they just need a Disha (Rakul Preet Singh) to bail them out every time? A film like Indian 2 could have explored such a point but thanks to Shankar’s battle-hardened temperament for only the low hanging fruit, the film too remains nothing but a measly effort going for the spectacle and spectacularly failing at that as well.