Nelson Dilipkumar’s Vijay-starrer BEAST starts off in a literal Beast mode where we see Veeraraghavan (Vijay), a well-informed and well-resourced Indian RAW agent, cleaning up the terrorists holed up in a mansion like a pack of cards.
We see some exceptional action choreography and stunt sequences during this stretch where we see Veeraraghavan slaying the terrorists, literally.
There were numerous instances where we sit in awe of the brilliant stunt choreography, and what better than our own Thalapathy to be at the helm of it, jumping and swaying from one end of the building to the other, handling the guns and knifes like a pair of bamboo sticks.
I quite liked how the movie did not have a “special” introduction scene to the star, which registered the fact that this wasn’t a usual Vijay movie that we are going to witness. This introduction setup was like a Bond character introduction where we see a one-man show kind of a sequence. Incidentally, Veera gets called the Indian James Bond. The movie then moves to a mall in Chennai being taken control by the terrorists, and we see a reluctant (PTSD suffering) Veera agreeing to help the Indian Government on one condition.
I loved the premise that shows the root cause for Veera’s PTSD where a small girl is considered to be just collateral damage by the agency for an ongoing operation but how it turns out to be a huge loss for the girl’s family. This is a great plotline for a movie of such tonality, an angle from which we do not see terrorism much and how it actually affects even the people involved in it. That’s how the movie started off, in fact, but once the mall hijack was set up, this potentially better plot was let loose.
The movie starts showing signs of feebleness during the mall hijack as it takes longer to set things up, but during this setup, we at least see the Nelson-esque comedy with VTV Ganesh in top form.
VTV Ganesh’s one-liners are rollicking, it reminded me of his performance in Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya. Selvaraghavan‘s Altaf was indeed a different one, his voice and his mannerism perfectly suited the sarcasm. The restricted comedy from Yogi Babu and Redin Kingsley was terrific but needed a lot more from all of them together. There was a brilliant opportunity to do a comedy of errors kind of a thing here, something along the lines of what we saw in that exceptionally staged Metro train fight sequence in Doctor. The brilliance of Kolamaavu Kokila was that it involved utilizing the maximum comic potential of Anbudasan and Yogi Babu, and similarly, in Doctor, we get stellar comic timing by Redin Kingsley, Yogi Babu, Shiva Aravind and Sunil Reddy (Killi-Maahali combo). I was pretty excited to see the Killi-Maahali combo here in Beast as well, it meant that it was in the same Nelson universe, but those two were criminally underutilized.
Beast tries too hard to seamlessly juggle between being a funny-spoof movie and a serious action thriller, but the transition isn’t as seamless as it was intended. What worked brilliantly in Doctor did not work here for the sole reason that a big star has come into the world of Nelson. When a big star like Vijay comes in, everything gets bigger and scaled up to massive levels. It is required to have elevation sequences just for the sake of having it, which dilutes the narrative if it isn’t a strong one like Beast. At one end, we see an indestructible Veera counter-attacking every terrorist plan with so much “conviction”, but suddenly he dodges 100 bullets and hit 7 men with just 7 bullets of a shotgun. On the other hand, we see the Selvaraghavan character joking with the terrorists during his negotiation, and at one point we even see the main head of the hijacker group give up his ongoing hijack. The worst of all, we see the head of the terrorist group shown as a dwarf. I am sure all this was done to be light-hearted, funny and spoof-kind, but the plot is lost while focusing more on the transition from serious to funny mode than focusing on the movie’s highs and lows.
The audience starts thinking about the logic and the loopholes only when they do not connect with the characters. There needs to be an emotional core for the audience to connect to, which eventually would drive the movie. I would have wanted more of Veera’s PTSD suffering to take centerstage and eventually act as leverage for the character to overcome, which would have been that “low” for Veera and then come out with the much needed “high”. When the emotions are at the right amounts, people do not have time to think about the logic, as they are already invested in your characters and have started rooting for them to win. This issue was addressed extraordinarily in Payanam movie (a flight hijack movie led by Nagarjuna, directed by Radha Mohan). We get invested so much in the emotions of the flight passengers that we forget the logical loopholes even if there were any. Eventually, we know that the Nagarjuna character will succeed with the mission, but the suspense was maintained brilliantly through the emotions of the characters.
Beast could have been something extraordinary had Nelson taken a little more care in setting up that emotional core, instead of conveniently tweaking his story to cater to the star power. I am sure he will come back stronger to his forte of dark comedy, he just needs to back his strong suit and not budge to the star power and other external factors, and write something that would fit any star into this universe of his.
Click here to subscribe to The Commune on Telegram and get the best stories of the day delivered to you personally.