Petta [dir. Karthik Subbaraj]

Petta is one of the best glamor shoots for its leading man Rajinikant. No really, after Mani Ratnam's Thalapathi as far back as 1991, this is probably the most beautiful looking 'Superstar' movie. Whether bathed in russet and amber glow, or cloaked in steel blue shadow, slightly out of focus like an emerging myth or sharp and up close like a sculpture in stone, the Rajini aura has almost never been so lovingly burnished. The legend himself, nattily dressed with mane-like coiffured hairpiece, looks relaxed and happy, a lion in his own jungle. Of course, Petta is far less ambitious than Thalapathi. In the erstwhile film Rajinikant played the Mahabharat inspired Surya / Karna, the iconic back-lighting as much in service of the character as of the star. Petta has no such thematic pretensions. The swanky production design (Suresh Selvarajan) and cinematographic lusciousness (S. Tirru) are for cosmetic effect (and what's wrong with that?). More crucially, Karthik 'Jigarthanda' Subbaraj's script is also purely in homage to the shrine of Rajini.

Using his iconic screen name 'Kaali', Rajini-saar swishes in as the new hostel warden of one of the strangest institutions: One with a cathedral sized assembly hall and a budget for candles that would make Sanjay Leela Bhansali proud, and prestigious enough to attract students from Australia, but where over-age thugs swagger the halls hazing newcomers, and the hostel idlis are hard enough to literally brain folks with. Kaali's entrance is equally strange - apparently his recommendation for the warden's post comes from the Prime Minister's secretary. When the true background of the character is revealed, one immediately wonders how he could have wrangled such a connection, but Petta's not a film for believable explanations. Kaali comes, he sees and he conquers - first the ragging thugs (led by Bobby Simha), then the corrupt mess contractor. While playing matchmaker to a young pair that came in from Australia, he meets cute with the girl's pranic healer mom (Simran, in real life near the age of Rajini's daughter, which here makes her an apt "mature romance" candidate).

A brilliantly shot "hero" action sequence with flashlights dancing in darkened corridors culminates in a dramatic reveal of Kaali's true purpose (with the expected drawn out flashback), and the introduction of new antagonists - Nawazuddin Siddiqui (dubbed) and Vijay Sethupati. The rest of the movie is about how Kaali takes the fight into the enemy's stronghold for the ultimate showdown, no prizes for guessing who wins. Some of the violence towards the end is unnecessarily gruesome (although not uncommon in the 80's potboilers Petta's roots lie in)

Petta is in the best and worst ways, a brand Rajini film: He talks, he walks, he dances, he nun-chucks, he everythings. There are numerous movie nods to both Rajini filmography and other  references - Mullum Malarum's Raman aandalum Ravana aandalum, rival Kamalahaasan's Andhi mazhai, Ennio Morricone's TGTBTU theme also gets a hat-tip. No character other than 'baas' carries any real weight. Simha and Sethupati have sufficient talent to bring nuance to their parts (and to be fair, Subbaraj does strive to make them more than run of the mill henchmen), but I doubt they would have accepted the roles without the R-factor. Some interesting supporting actor / cameo choices for Tamil movie fans - veteran comedian YG Mahendran, actor-director M Sasikumar (Subramaniapuram) and J Mahendran (he directed Rajini in Mullum Malarum) The women (Simran, Trisha, Malavika Mohanan, Megha Akash) uniformly have "say your two lines and GTFO" appearances. Once the action begins they are pushed off-stage, not returning even for a "The End" frame. Baas' party is purely a Boys' affair, but those invited are guaranteed a good time.

2.0 [dir. Shankar]

While the trailer of 2.0 aka Endhiran / Robot 2 had moments of significant interest, I was not very hopeful of the end product. Shankar's last movie was crap. And let's face it, 'Superstar' Rajini isn't getting any younger. Even with the layers of pancake, and rather obvious wigs and fake goatees he looks like someone's grandpa at a fancy dress party - a simple shot showing his character slapping water on the face has to be haphazardly edited because it would be a make-up disaster. The pairing with Akshay Kumar (who ironically plays a geriatric nagging crank bird-lover) is a purely commercial exercise to draw in the Hindi audiences as well to diffuse the risk of this stratospheric budget movie. The reviews, including from my favorite critic Baradwaj Rangan were middling as well, suggesting that everything between the action and VFX is immensely boring and turgid.

Well, the reviews are right about the in-between stuff being dull filler, but what they don't tell you is that, apart from a testing flashback sequence in which the baddie Akshay Kumar character spells out his bird-brained motivation, there is very little footage that is not badass action or spectacular VFX. Again technically, the graphicsdon't have the same level of pixel perfect polish as your MCU or Star Wars movies, but they're a hell lot better than Bahuballyhoo, and Shankar's imagination as a visual director remains unparalleled. The action and VFX scenes in this movie are way more exciting than most stuff I've seen in Hollywood movies in recent years. In terms of inspiration this movie is like Terminator meets Transformers meets Avengers/JL, and without the bloat of those movies. While Rajinikant is ho-hum in his nice guy parts, he seems to find a special glee in playing Evil Chitti (and another character who I shall not spoil here), since it probably comes as such a relief to the goody-goody characters he has been restricted to play once he became a big star. And he gets to mouth several hilarious quips (at least some of the puns and allusions work only for Tamil movie goers, don't know how they are substituted in the Hindi version). This movie is in overall feel like Pacific Rim - really dumb but really awesome.

I saw it in Tamil 2D at the local screen with about a dozen people total in the auditorium, let me see if I can catch the 3D version as well.

Endhiran aka Robot [S. Shankar]

Rewind some 3 years back to Sivaji – The Boss, the first collaboration between mega-star Rajnikant and mega-director S. Shankar. Given the colossally exaggerated stylistic flourish of several of the films made by these two names in their individual capacities, one expected the end product to be the embodiment of chutzpah and ass-kickery in the realm of mainstream Dravidian cinema. Sadly, this was not to be. The rare bit aside, Sivaji proved to be despite its lavishness lackluster, and the combination of “Baas” Rajni and Shankar turned out a wasted opportunity. Flash to the present now, to another collaboration of these two phenomena in the form of Endhiran aka Robot. How does the die roll this time around? Short answer: THIS is what Sivaji should have been. THIS is, in capital letters, REDEMPTION.

The most important thing that anyone going to watch this film should keep in mind is that it is built around the legend of its leading man; putting it simply, the movie exists to show there's nothing Rajni Kan't. Yes, one of the lead characters is a scientist (Rajni) and the other is his humanoid robot (Rajni, again), and there are casually dropped remarks about cloning, fuel cells and electromagnetism. But you don't need to be even remotely geeky to see that the science is utter hokum. When you're the most expensive Indian film made (180 crore rupees or more, approximately US$40 million) in a nation where even basic literacy is at a premium, you can't conjure a techno-fantasy to appeal to the fetishes of high school nerds, and robo-Rajni's references to his “one terahertz processor, one zetabyte memory” are probably about as much technical jargon as the largest contingent of Rajni-fans will take before keeling over.

In the admittedly absurd narrative, scientist Rajni devotes all his attention to making an advanced robot soldier that he proposes to provide as an asset to the Indian armed forces. He goes rather far in said quest, bothering to give the robot artificial skin (even feeds the robot dancing modules, which could...umm, I don't know...help at those military balls). Scientist Rajni's work must really take its toll on his health because despite being depicted as an eligible bachelor with a medical student girlfriend, one could swear that at several moments he looks rather like grandpa in a bad wig. Harrumph, let's remind ourselves again that this is a Rajnikant film and push ahead. Robo-Rajni is proudly unveiled and takes his first steps into the living world, accompanied by a large number of simple-minded jokes about his bumbles with understanding humans, some of which, like his run-in with a corrupt traffic cop, are actually funny. Scientist Rajni then uses this evolved robot as a super-expensive valet (although given auto-rickshaw rates and attitude of drivers in Chennai, perhaps even actual servants cost a bomb and behave thuggishly). He also blithely loans him to the girlfriend (Aishwarya Rai, aged and dumb-mannered enough to support the character of a repeat failure medico). This affords the opportunity for Shankar to rub spit between the palms and break out some of his trademark visual chutzpah. A brilliantly mounted sequence where robo-Rajni takes on a small battalion of ruffians on and off a local train comes off as one of the best action sequences one has ever seen up till then.

In the meanwhile, scientist Rajni's erstwhile mentor, played by classy Bollywood baddie Danny Denzongpa, grows jealous of his student's success and after failed attempts to copy the magic formula (robo-Rajni's “neural schema”) makes use of his position in the regulatory board (for robo-research? I couldn't get that clearly) to reject robo-Rajni's entry as a combat soldier on the basis that he lacks “feeling” and cannot distinguish friend and foe. With the help of more absurd techno-jargon, scientist Rajni apparently “injects” feelings into his creation. This brings up a whole slew of problems as robo-Rajni with his “humane” outlook falls for the scientist's girlfriend and asserts his right to “live and love”. Cue then to spiraling chaos as “now feeling” robo-Rajni is turned to evil to achieve his end, even making a clone army in the process. What happens then and how his mega-menace is finally vanquished forms the remainder of the proceedings.

Having Rajnikant play the lead in a film is a double-edged sword. On the one financial success is almost a given; his fans care nothing that their superstar is in real life a bald, paunchy 60-year old with total disregard to sartorial trends. But it also severely limits his onscreen character. Presenting him as anything other than the super-heroic “protector of the poor” and “son of a thousand mothers” or daring to show him getting even slightly roughed up by a baddie has proved to be often dangerous to the makers and exhibitors of films in that part of the country. Shankar has circumvented this major limitation with his double-role gambit. Who better to provide a serious challenge to the heroic Rajni than a villainous Rajni? The superstar, who in the early days of his acting career played several roles with negative shades, grabs with palpable relish the long-lost chance of portraying a baddie again, and with his characteristic aplomb, significantly effaces reservations of him being the right actor for the role. In short Evil Rajni rocks!!!

But the foremost reason for seeing this film is its sequences of large scale daredevilry and visual effects audacity. My biggest fear after the aforementioned train battle was whether the rest of the film would have stuff to match it. As it turned out, that scene was not only matched but pounded to the ground by the sheer awesomeness of the action that followed. The CGI may not have the polish and integration that the typical Hollywood summer blockbuster has, but in my view Shankar's conception and choreography of the action rivals and even surpasses the work of the Wachowskis and Michael Bay. The climax with the shenanigans of the clone army of robo-Rajnis is the apogee of the imagination and painstaking effort taken to make the film. Also, thanks to the very malleable standards of the Indian censor board, this “U” certificate film happily shows us such sights as the large scale massacre of policemen, which even the Terminator franchise had to nerf in its sequels.

There are caveats, yes. The filler in between the action can be tedious, though I'd assert no more so than any other stereotype Rajni film; most scenes featuring Aishwarya Rai fall in this category. You'd think at least a film of this scale and intent would stoke him, but AR Rahman continues his trend of “Money for Nothing” scores, and only the song sequences shot in Machu Pichu and in the WTF futuristic lair of evil Rajni match up to the hallucinatory goodness of Shankar's erstwhile song picturizations. But to my mind the good parts of this film by their sheer impact far eclipse its weaknesses and I can confidently regard Endhiran/Robot as one of the most entertaining films in the repertoires of both Rajnikant and Shankar. Viva la combinación!