Thupparivaalan aka Detective [dir. Mysskin]

A dedication at the start of Thupparivaalan salutes Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and 'the mercurial' Jeremy Brett. But the detective hero of Mysskin's movie owes more to the rude arsehole of the Robert Downey Jr. interpretation. 'Action' star Vishal is Kaniyan Poongundran, the archaically named moody sleuth that 'rebels at stagnation' (in the hero introduction scene he stomps all over his book-lined apartment, petulantly demanding to be given a challenging case). He behaves like a  perfect tyrant with almost everyone, but most notably his 'Watson' Manohar (Prasanna) who seems a loser with no life of his own.

Kaniyan takes up the case of a schoolboy whose family dog was murdered, but the matter quickly escalates to a more sinister degree, involving a gang of assassins-for-hire (including a near-unrecognizable Bhagyaraj) who come up with some truly outre ways of carrying out their hits. The plot is all over the place, but Mysskin's writing delivers some ingenious fun moments, like when the killers carry out a Rube Goldberg scheme of offing a target with the help of nitrous oxide aka laughing gas - this would not be out of place in a Denny O' Neil - Dick Giordano 70's era Batman comic (for some reason, all mentions of nitrous oxide are bleeped out in the soundtrack, as though they were threatened with legal action by the gas manufacturers). Kaniyan's incongruous golf cap and ascot - standing in, one supposes, for Holmes' deerstalker and pipe - and the throwaway references to Tamil pulp fiction detective Sankarlal and Stanley Kubrick raise chuckles as well.

Thupparivaalan becomes less interesting in the bigger picture. The villains bandy a generic ruthlessness (the leader takes a coffee break in the middle of chainsawing a corpse, whoop-de-whoop), the 'HERO' action scenes and location hopping chases lose the idiosyncratic touch (although one of them ends in a memorably crazy Seppuku sequence). Also, Kaniyan's treatment of the token romance (a simpering Anu Emmanuel) is risible. But even while commercial, this film has more of the Mysskin personality than his Mugamoodi and is a decent watch for fans.