Blast review: Arjun's comeback, Preity's breakout

Most families settle their arguments at the dinner table. The Rajarams clear it of vegetables first, then reach for whatever is nearest. Subash K Raj’s debut runs on that one satisfying idea: a middle-class Chennai household where father, mother and daughter can each take a room of goons apart before the rice goes cold. It sits closer to John Wick than to Drishyam, and it knows it.

Rajaram (Arjun) is a karate master, the billing the team pushed hard in the run-up to release, and he teaches his daughter Nila a single rule early. When someone is wronged in front of you, you do not walk past. Nila (Preity Mukundhan) grows into a pharmacy-working, no-nonsense woman who lives by it, to the constant worry of her mother Neelaveni (Abhirami), who would far rather she pick a husband than pick fights. Then a rowdy strolls into Nila’s medical shop, gets flattened, and the family lands in the crosshairs of a corporate shark named Varun Dayalan (John Kokken), a 7,000 crore mining racket, and a coldly watchable assassin called Abraham (Arjun Chidambaram).

Dinner is served: the film’s poster sums up its whole tone, kitchen on one side, arsenal on the other.

The real find here is Preity. Every kick, lock and cracked skull lands with conviction, and the film is smart enough to keep her at the centre rather than hand the heroics to its bigger names. Arjun, refreshingly, plays second fiddle and looks like he is enjoying the breather, slipping into vintage form whenever the action calls for it. Abhirami spends a beat too long as the marriage-pushing mother, but the moment she swaps the kitchen for combat at the interval, the theatre wakes up.

What keeps the film humming through its baggier stretches is the craft. Ravi Basrur, in his first Tamil outing, keeps the adrenaline high, and stunt choreographer Phoenix Prabhu makes a two-bedroom house feel like a brand-new arena every time. You would not think a fight staged inside a kitchen could keep surprising you. It does.

It is not airtight. The villains and cops run on suspiciously low IQ, the screenplay shows its hand early, and at two and a half hours it overstays its welcome. But there is real wit in the way the film watches men refuse to take a woman seriously, right up to the moment she is the one deciding what everyone else does next. That choice, and the bruises it earns, is what Blast is finally about.