Leo [dir. Lokesh Kanagaraj]

Lokesh Kanagaraj's 'Thalapathy' Vijay-starrer Leo is basically A History of Violence (AHoV)...for Dummies.

In David Cronenberg's 2005 movie, Viggo Mortensen played amiable small-town restauranter and family man Tom Stall, who suddenly displays a ruthless streak taking down murderous thugs that invade his diner. Hailed as a local hero for his bravery, mild-mannered Tom's life gets complicated when a vicious gangster (Ed Harris with a scarred eye) drops in claiming that Tom is actually Joey Cusack, hitman for a crime syndicate. The gangster doesn't believe Tom's denials and stalks his family to pressure him into confession, even kidnapping Tom's son, which culminates in another bloodbath. The violence creates estrangement and strife in Tom's personal life. One day he gets a call from a man claiming to be Joey's brother, a big city criminal who wants Joey to return, threatening that he will otherwise come out to find him.

Kanagaraj lifts the premise almost wholesale: When crazed criminals invade Parthiban (Vijay)'s snazzy coffee shop in Theog, Himachal and threaten evil tidings to his little girl, he guns them down unhesitatingly and with superhuman accuracy. Shortly after, the kin of the slain gangsters who come in for revenge get slaughtered by Parthiban in a market brawl, making his wife (Trisha) wonder about the man she married. Then a gnarly old gangster Antony Das (Sanjay Dutt) drops in, insisting that Parthiban is actually his son Leo, a killer. Das also kidnaps Parthiban's son to make him admit his identity. Sounds familiar?

AHoV has a reputation as a masterful study of inner violence, but I couldn't buy into it. Compared to previous Cronenberg ventures like Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and Crash, AHoV's layering is juvenile pop-psychology. The bad guys who come in after Tom/Joey, including his brother (William Hurt) are such flat caricatures there's no sense of the uncontrollable animal inside Tom.

But if I felt that way about the source film, Leo takes it down several notches, using the plot as yet another star-glorifying vehicle, albeit a frequently stylish one. In AHoV, till the diner assault, Tom is seen only as the sweet-natured whitebread townie. In Vijay's introductory scene he tackles an aggressive runaway hyena, even giving gyaan about animal behavior to the local forest ranger (Gautham Menon in another paycheck part), finally jabbing a tranquilizer by hand into the animal.

This is before we get the tour of him waltzing through the coffee shop to the strains of an English song called Ordinary Person, telling us how utterly "ordinary" this guy is. Yeah, right. Later on, we have more "Now feeling" songs like I'm Scared and Badass; because Thalapathy can't act his way out of a paper bag, he needs this Greek chorus equivalent to explain what his character is going through at each stage.  When the fracas with the coffee shop invaders happens, it is set to retro jukebox Tamil tunes, softening the impact of the violence, making it more a flashy "hero" fight. To Kanagaraj's credit he does give these baddies a neat little backstory of how they landed in the cafe. After gunning down the felons, Vijay expresses his character's horror at his own violence by yelling aloud, in a hilarious imitation of Kamalahaasan's Guna histrionics.

As Antony Das, Sanjay Dutt regurgitates the "heavy" he played in the Agneepath remake and KGF: Chapter 2. Das runs a front of a tobacco business, and to emphasize this point the characters in this movie smoke like chimneys (Thankfully, Netflix doesn't bother with the mandatory on-screen smoking disclaimers). But the real business for Antony and his brother Harold(!) - played by Arjun Sarja - is drugs. Even here Kanagaraj shows his weird tastes by having the brothers deal in datura, a poisonous plant. Datura extracts have psychoactive properties, but they are not the "feel good" variety of drugs, used more as ritual poisons / fear-generating hallucinogens. When in an extended flashback sequence that also bungs in a "mass" number, you are told Antony Das' motive to track down Leo, you start to wish you had some datura toxin to swallow.

Leo's screenplay is a trainwreck of dead-ends and pointless twists. As depicted here, the character's dual nature is not particularly different from films like Hum and Baasha where an apparently mild-mannered protagonist is revealed to have a violent history he is covering up. The near 3-hour runtime is such a slog I had to split my viewing into 3 instalments. But it does have some of Kanagaraj's best directed action sequences. The highlight for me is a chase sequence where Parthiban, riding shotgun on a bike, chases after a convoy of vehicles driven by Antony's gang who have kidnapped his son. It features that same brand of painstakingly storyboarded and executed action that distinguished his 2019 Kaithi. The camera is an active participant in the proceedings, swooping back and forth, even going through vehicles. It's (ha!) fast and furious, yet maintains clarity in the sequence of events. Leo is probably also the hardest that Vijay has worked on a film in recent years, physically at least. In contrast to turds like Sarkar, where he just waltzes through the fight scenes while bad guys fall all around him, he is shown to have tougher battles, often taking a fair pounding before he finally prevails. If you do decide to subject yourself to the film, these might be small saving graces.

Showing now on Netflix in India.