DC review: A brutal bargain worth taking

In DC, getting arrested is less a setback than a change of location. Devadas is caught twice, jailed, beaten, and still returns to business. The second time, the cops arrange a showy execution in a remote spot, look away for roughly one blink, and lose him. This should be maddening. Somehow, for most of the film’s 143 minutes, it is not.

That is because Arun Matheswaran knows exactly what film he is making. His fourth feature after Rocky, Saani Kaayidham and Captain Miller is a commercial entertainer planted firmly in the gore, guttural and violence category, and he never pretends otherwise. There is no attempt to keep one foot in an arthouse revenge drama and the other in a star vehicle. Logic will take hits, the writing will arrange useful coincidences, and entertainment comes first. The film is upfront about that deal, the audience walks in knowing it, and the clarity keeps DC from becoming a half-baked compromise.

In a retro Tamil Nadu, Devadas (Lokesh Kanagaraj) runs with a gang built around Arasu (Thalaivasal Vijay) after corrupt policemen kill a boy’s father. They rob the powerful, shield the poor, and attract Bhojraj (Krish Dayal), a cop whose preferred investigative technique is brutality. A club singer, Parvathi (Sanjana), briefly draws out the romantic in Das before Chandra (Wamiqa Gabbi), a sex worker every bit as volatile as him, walks in and matches his madness.

The casting is more than a promotional trick. Fresh off directing Coolie, Lokesh turns out to be a natural fit for a man who fears neither death nor physical pain, someone for whom violence is not a last resort but a resting language. He plays this moody, capricious guy with a heart really well, and the film is smart to frame him as an antihero rather than a hero. Even the multi-man takedowns carry enough weight and resistance to stay just about believable, which is what keeps you inside the film instead of counting the stuntmen waiting for their turn.

The film’s retro outlaw iconography is committed: the van, the rifle, the rose.

Wamiqa brings the required wildness to Chandra without turning her into a decorative accomplice, and the romance works because neither is written as the cure for the other. Sanjana makes her short stretch count, while Thalaivasal Vijay and Avinash Raghudevan give the gang human texture. As for Bhojraj, casting someone without star power was the right call. A Lokesh versus SJ Suryah style matchup would have turned the film into a contest. Bhojraj needs to be a threat, not half the poster.

Anirudh is effectively a lead in this film. Parts of the soundtrack settle into his familiar generic pulse, but hand him the heaviest moments and he is frighteningly reliable. The interval block alone is worth the ticket, and the scene between the two fathers leading up to the climax battle gets its charge from a score that knows exactly when to press down. Mukesh G’s camerawork operates in tandem with that music, and together they build the immersion the whole film banks on.

Arun Matheswaran keeps reaching for the painterly, whether it is a Van Gogh backdrop or a rose held between teeth.

The screenplay is far less disciplined. Nearly every encounter could use a tighter, more logical setup. Early on, a man announces the location of his money to exactly the wrong room. Armed parties keep catching each other off guard. Das escapes because the story needs him free for the next eruption. And stretches of the film play like a slideshow with Anirudh blaring underneath, the movie advancing in presentation mode between its highs. None of this sinks it, but it is the gap between very good and great.

What Arun gets right is restraint where it counts: no overcooked melodrama, no invincible monument where a lead character should be. DC honours the bargain its A certificate announces. Surrender some logic, get a ferocious, beautifully crafted night at the movies. It is probably a watch-once film. Make that once count in a theatre, because on OTT, with the sound shrunk and the frames domesticated, the spell will lose blood fast.