Kattalan review: all swagger and no stakes

Some action films sweep you up first and dare you to question the logic later. Kattalan never gets you that far. Paul George’s debut, the latest export from the Marco stable, is so busy striking poses that it forgets to make you believe a single blow.

The setup has teeth on paper. In the forest village of Aanakkolli, a gangster called Maari (Sunil) runs an ivory empire built on slaughtered elephants and sawn-off tusks, moved past the law by his most dependable transporter, Antony (Antony Varghese). When a rival cartel and old debts close in, Antony becomes the man everyone needs and no one can put down. There is a grim survival thriller buried in that premise. The film keeps stepping over it to reach the next slow-motion entry.

Antony Varghese has the build and the glower the role wants, and looks every bit a one-man wrecking crew.

The real problem is that none of it feels real enough to grip. The action is pitched so high and staged so loosely that the make-believe never takes hold. Three men bring down a charging elephant. A dozen armed thugs cannot corner one guy. A two-against-twelve shootout somehow finishes two-nil. By the time a village decides that modelling itself on the LTTE is a sound life plan, you have stopped suspending disbelief and started giggling at it. A mindless entertainer that knows it is one can be a fine night out. Kattalan plays all of this with a straight, self-serious face, which is the harder thing to sit through.

Antony is convincing in the purely physical beats. The moment the character has to feel something, the dialogue lands flat, read rather than lived. Around him a capable cast is mostly furniture. Sunil’s Maari is menacing in a single register and left there. Dushara Vijayan, in her Malayalam debut, turns up so late and with so little to do that you half forget she was on the posters.

Dushara Vijayan cuts a striking figure the script never bothers to use.

What does land is the surface. The film is genuinely good-looking, all warm shadow and smoke-thick forest, and the production values are the real deal, with the Thai stunt crew and pan-Indian hires visibly on screen. Ravi Basrur’s score, fresh off Blast, swings for the KGF rafters, though here it is doing the heavy lifting the writing should have. The cameos and post-credit teases promise a whole shared universe. First, this corner of it needs a story worth continuing.

Kattalan has the muscles and the money. It just never gives you a reason to care whether any of it connects.