THUG LIFE REVIEW
Cast: Kamal Haasan, Silambarasan TR, Trisha Krishnan, Abhirami, Joju George, Nasser, Mahesh Manjrekar, Ali Fazal
Director: Mani Ratnam
Rating: 2.5/5
Every so often, the cinematic gods promise a feast prepared by Michelin-starred chefs and end up delivering a lukewarm TV dinner. Thug Life is that TV dinner, a perfectly edible but profoundly unfulfilling meal served on the gilded platter of a Mani Ratnam-Kamal Haasan reunion. It arrives with the thunderous hype of a legacy sequel, a gangster epic meant to echo past glories, but fades into the kind of film you forget you’ve seen by the time you reach the parking lot. The story kicks off with a moody, black-and-white prologue that feels like a stylish perfume ad for moral decay, where our don-in-the-making, Rangaraya Sakthivel (Kamal Haasan), inadvertently orphans a young boy named Amar. Wracked with a flicker of guilt, he does what any self-respecting crime lord would do: adopts the kid and grooms him to be his right-hand man. This setup, a cocktail of loyalty and resentment, should be gangster-movie gold. For a while, it almost is. The first half chugs along with a certain gravitas, coasting on Ravi K. Chandran’s gorgeous cinematography, which somehow manages to make Old Delhi look both grimy and majestic, like a forgotten palace that now hosts illegal fight clubs.
But then, the second act arrives, and the entire enterprise gracefully swan-dives off a cliff, much like its hero. What follows is a bafflingly generic and sluggish game of thrones, played with all the urgency of a town hall meeting. The screenplay, co-piloted by the two legends themselves, feels less like a script and more like a collection of scenes that someone forgot to connect with emotional tissue. Characters explain their motivations in long, ponderous monologues, as if they’re reading their own Wikipedia entries aloud. The fraternal bond between Sakthivel and his protégé Amar (Silambarasan, radiating a smoldering presence in search of a purpose) dissolves not with a bang, but with a series of misunderstandings that feel less like Shakespearian tragedy and more like a sitcom plot. Trisha Krishnan appears as a mistress whose primary function is to be occasionally embraced by Kamal, a character so extraneous she might as well have been a particularly well-dressed lamp. The women here are afterthoughts, existing only to react to the men’s endless, circular brooding.
Kamal Haasan, a titan of the craft, seems to be acting in his own, more operatic movie, delivering a performance with the dial turned to 11 while the film itself is stuck on mute. His undying, logic-defying hero survives falls, explosions, and avalanches with the kind of regenerative power usually reserved for cartoon coyotes. Meanwhile, A.R. Rahman’s score, typically a source of divine intervention in a Ratnam film, feels out of place. The entire affair becomes a cinematic endurance test, a two-and-a-half-hour wait for a spark that never ignites. The problem with Thug Life isn’t that it’s offensively bad; it’s that it’s tragically, monumentally mediocre. It’s a beautifully shot, impressively cast, and profoundly hollow echo of a masterpiece that never was.