Blast lines up for May 28 with Arjun as a karate master, Subash K Raj's debut and Ravi Basrur's Tamil first

AGS Entertainment’s Blast is set for a worldwide theatrical release on May 28, and the team came out to Chennai on Monday for the first proper look at the cast and the makers behind it. Arjun, in the lead, plays a karate master, the first time he has taken the role in a career that has run on action since the mid-eighties. Debut director Subash K Raj, who came up through Pradeep Ranganathan’s writing room before pitching the script to AGS, was on stage for what he said was his first speech anywhere. KGF composer Ravi Basrur was next to him, on his own first outing in Tamil cinema. Abhirami and Preithy Mukundhan, both with action-heavy parts, round out the lead line-up.

Producer Archana Kalpathi, who runs the creative side with her sister Aishwarya at AGS’s twentieth year, framed Blast as a family-action film built around how a girl should be raised in a world that is not safe for her. The pitch is a father, a daughter, and the case for self-defence as something to put inside a young woman rather than around her. Arjun, she said, was the only name they considered for the father role because of his own two daughters off-screen. The two women in the lead, Abhirami and Preithy Mukundhan, both have action characters; one of them, Abhirami’s, was modelled on Subash K Raj’s mother, a karate black belt.

Subash K Raj pointed at Pradeep Ranganathan, his “film guru”, as the reason any of this is happening. He worked on Love Today first; when he had a script of his own to pitch, Pradeep walked him into the AGS office. He pitched to Aishwarya, then Archana, and finally to Aghoram, one of the three Kalpathi brothers running the studio, who greenlit it on the spot. “I have made this film without any compromise anywhere,” Subash said. He also called Arjun headlining a debut film the part of all of this he was most quietly proud of.

Ravi Basrur, on his Tamil debut, said he had spent months turning down Tamil scripts. “Tamil cinema is an ocean. You don’t enter it without preparation.” Subash’s pitch, he said, included how each action set-piece would actually be cut, and that was the level of detail that landed. Because Subash was a first-time director, Ravi said, he had set aside what he had done before and started fresh on Blast, and called it the best film he has scored. International players are on the album, and the score, he said, is built for a theatre room rather than headphones.

For Preithy Mukundhan, who plays Nila, this is the first action role of her career, after a run of comedy, horror and romantic-lead parts. She said action characters with this much weight are rare for women in Tamil cinema, and that was why she said yes the moment she heard the part. Abhirami, in her own slot, said her character was modelled on Subash’s karate-black-belt mother and called the role the first time she was being filmed as “violent and terrifying”. Her last screen pairing with Arjun, she added, was twenty-five years ago, and she did not know why it took this long to get back.

Arjun opened his slot with a line for Chief Minister Vijay, whom he called “my friend”, congratulating him on his electoral run. He moved into the film as a karate-master role he had not been offered in four decades on screen, said Subash had the rare quality of staying inside his own story even on a debut, and noted that AGS creative producer Aishwarya Kalpathi had been on the floor with the unit at two in the morning during shoot. Both AGS and Ravi Basrur use the same word for how they evaluate talent: “zoom in”. Arjun, on his first AGS film, said the studio had finally zoomed in on him.

The technical crew has Arun Radhakrishnan on the camera, Phoenix Prabhu on stunts, Veeramani Ganesan on production design, and Pradeep E. Ragav on the cut. Think Music has the album. Blast goes worldwide on May 28.