2.0 Movie Review - Page 7

Cast: Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson

Director: S Shankar

Rating: 2 Stars (Out of 5)

He is back. This time around, Chitti is reloaded and primed to confront a force that is out to eliminate mobile phones and cellular transmission towers from Tamil Nadu. The battle between good and evil, between nature and technology, plays out over two and a half hours in a zone where all the dividing lines are blurred in a way that creates the possibility of multiple interpretations. But because the storytelling is, well, robotic, the frenetic action sequences rarely touch the heights that the flying mobiles achieve. The film talks at length about the sad reality of the sparrows vanishing from our metropolises - a theme culled from newspapers and social media platforms - but the pressing nature of the debate is buried deep under a flashy, impressive demo of animatronics, special effects and prosthetics.

Eight years is a long time in the life of a movie star. But for Rajnikanth, any hiatus can only be a flash.2.0, director and co-screenwriter Shankar's follow-up to 2010's Enthiran (Robot in Hindi), has materialised after the Tamil cinema supernova has used the long break to appear in four films (Kochadaiiyaan, Lingaa, Kabali and Kaala). It has been in the works longer than it took Dr Vaseegaran to conjure up Chitti the thinking robot. The film and its star show clear signs of wear and tear. For Rajnikanth fans, however, this shouldn't be more than a minor irritant.

Rajinikanth in 2.0

A mysterious power - its genesis is established in the film's opening sequence in which a man hangs himself from a cell tower - is out to eliminate mobile telephony from the face of the earth. Towers are uprooted and crushed. Handsets fly off the hands of their owners and turn into a destructive wave. A city is in the grip of complete mayhem. The army is called out but the soldiers draw a blank. The good scientist is roped in to stop the impending calamity. He advises bringing Chitti back from the dead. That, he says, is the only effective option in the fight against the new menace. His plan is resisted by elements in the administration but as matters begin to go out of control, Vaseegaran secures a free hand.

"Maut se zinda lautne ka mazaa kuch aur hi hai (nothing can match the joy of returning alive from death)," says Chitti in the film's Hindi version (dialogue writer: Abbas Tyrewala) just before he declares: "I am the one, the super one." Who dare question him? Definitely not fellow humanoid Nila (Amy Jackson), another of Vaseegaran's creations. On the face of it, the lead actor plunges into the universe of the two pivotal characters - the invincible robot and his brilliant creator - with all his might. But look deeper and there is a visible dip in his enthusiasm for and belief in the project. Fans sold on Rajnikanth's unrelenting starry sangfroid might therefore have reason to feel somewhat shortchanged.

With Akshay Kumar, in his first-ever southern foray, exuding both star power and emotive energy in the second half of the film in the guise of an ageing ornithologist livid at the fast depleting bird numbers and then as a vengeance seeker for the avian deaths, 2.0 would have been regarded as an improved, stronger version of its predecessor had the plot been a tad more convincing. Bunkum is bunkum no matter how big the bucks behind it are.

Akshay Kumar in 2.0

Of course, director Shankar possesses a penchant for couching the fantastical and the unreal in felt human dilemmas. He brings this attribute into full play in addressing the damage that cellular radiation causes to the environment. But the frustration of the activist fighting to save the birds but failing in his mission isn't brought out to the extent that would justify the murderous crusade that Pakshirajan (Akshay Kumar) launches against mobile phone sellers and users. The comic-strip superficiality of his war manifests itself in the manner in which he kills a wholesaler, a transmission tower owner and a telecom minister: one blown to smithereens, the other squeezed to pulp, and another literally poisoned with a diamond-studded mobile phone.

Amy Jackson as the super-efficient robot who is at the beck and all of her master is aptly mechanical but does just enough not to be swamped out of this sci-fi action film designed primarily for Rajnikanth's larger-than-life, crowd-pleasing screen persona.

Amy Jackson and Rajinikanth in 2.0

The supporting actors in a Rajnikanth vehicle serve a limited purpose. It is no different in 2.0 although the cast of the film includes Adil Hussain in the role of the home minister, a man charged with formulating a response to the attack of the mobile phones. But his agency is quickly taken away from him as Vaseegaran, Chitti and Nila take over as a powerful adversary threatens to overrun the city.

So, is the most expensive Indian film ever mounted worth all the money that has been sunk into it? It looks and sounds great for the most part. It whizzes by thanks to the breathless action and the dazzling VFX. 2.0, however, would have been a far greater film had the screenplay dared to go beyond the known tricks of the genre. There is a hint of a romantic entanglement between Chitti and Nila, both of whom are capable of feeling and expressing love. But this track remains an insignificant subplot in a film in which even the baddie is an A-list Bollywood star and needs to be made a part of a respectable chunk of the action, especially when he makes his entry only after the intermission.

The right-versus-wrong tropes that 2.0 employs are trite, but the battle at the heart of the film - it pits a warped model of development against the need for ecological conservation in a no-holds-barred fantasy - has moments that are thought-provoking and entertaining at once. But even for Rajnikanth, pulling this erratic, messy epic out of the fire is no cakewalk. He comes pretty close. Watch 2.0 for its scale and ambition, if not for the superstar who can do no wrong.

Language: Tamil

Director: Shankar

Cast: Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson

A meme popped up on my Twitter timeline this morning, saying that Rajinikanth is the only actor in the world who's been in four kinds of films: black-and-white, colour, animation and 3D. I thought up another meme after watching2.0, Shankar's follow-up to Endhiran. Rajinikanth is the only actor in the world to do hundreds of roles in the same film, as both human and humanoid, in avatars that range from small to normal-sized big to super-big... But let's not get ahead of ourselves. 2.0 appears to pick up whereEndhiran left off. If you remember, the ending leapfrogged 20 years, when Chitti (The good robot, whose rogue version gives this film its title) was an exhibit in a museum. So it surprised me, in this sequel, to see that Sana (Aishwarya Rai, who we see only as an image on a phone) is still the scientist Vaseegaran's girlfriend. (Forget dating. This has begun to veer into the realm of carbon dating.) And she's still as annoying, constantly sulking that Vaseegaran is not paying her any attention. At least, she's not reduced to a garlanded photo on the wall. Sorry. Scratch that. At least, she's not reduced to a shimmering hologram whose backdrop keeps alternating between the seven wonders of the world. I forgot for a second that we are in a Shankar movie.

A lot of it is Shankar's fault. He is a superb imaginator. A flock of cell phones, swirling like birds, transforms into the leg of a bird of prey. A bedroom turns into a death trap, vibrating with ghostly mobile-phone beeps. A road transforms into a silver tsunami. A cell phone glows inside a man's belly, like the monster in Alienwaiting to burst forth. (Things go satisfyingly splat! a few seconds later, presumably as predicted in the Garuda Puranam.) But this is all Shankar seems to be interested in now these visualWOWs. As a writer-director, Shankar has stopped caring about characters, relationships, or even infusing the narrative with tension. The barebones of the plot was familiar to many of us from the trailer. But the writing is so mechanical, you suspect Nila spat out the script after being fed the Shankar To-Do List of Plot Points.

Also Read: Every Shankar Film Ranked

A series of strange murders? Check. The second-half flashback? Check. An Anniyan-like scene where two personalities one meek, one menacing burst out of the same character? Check. An Indian-like development where a benevolent old man turns into a pissed-off vigilante in order to teach uncaring people a lesson? Check. Repeating pet themes is not the problem. The repetitiveness in the writing is. The setup goes on forever (and that's a long time to be stuck with Vaseegaran). And yet, things happen instantly. Vaseegaran and Nila set out to discover the location of the missing cell phones that set the plot in motion. Boom. They land right at the spot. (Why not make it seem like a bit of hi-tech sleuthing?) The son of the Danny Denzongpa character from Endhiranwants to undo Vaseegaran's good work.Boom. He lands right inside the scientist's facility. (Why not make it a bit of a heist?)

Akshay Kumar plays the villain. You can see why he took up a part where he's reduced to grey sweaters, a shuffling gait and a million pixels. He's continuing to campaign against the evils that affect the nation. (He might have called this filmToucan: Ek Prem Katha. Or Airtellift.) But the role needed more screen time to make us care if not for his character, then at least about the things he does. And the sensitivity behind his stand is buried under Shankar's bombast. Resul Pookutty, in an interview to Film Companion South, said that the toughest sound he had to design was that of a sparrow drawing its last breath. Why bury this innovation under AR Rahman's sentimental background music?

If 2.0 works to an extent, it's due to the big set pieces. This is where Shankar the Imaginator shines brightest. We've seen two giant creatures locked in battle in theTransformers movies. But we haven't seen one of them turn into a horseshoe magnet and... I'll leave that for you to find out.Wacko doesn't do justice to the second half, where Rajinikanth finally cuts loose. In one scene, Chitti stays in character romancing Nila to the strains of the flower duet from the opera, Lakm and simultaneously gets all meta, saying, "Indha Number 1 Number 2 laam paapavilayattu. (The numbers game is for kids.) This is Rajinikanth playing a scene with another character and also winking at the audience. On the one hand, you have a "save the birds message. On the other, you have a character threatening to strangle pigeons. That's the good thing about Shankar. He keeps throwing things at you. Now, if he'd only get a good writer to shape all these things into a solid script, it would make all the difference between 2.oho and 2.uh-oh!