{"id":35335,"date":"2022-06-03T18:11:01","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T18:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/vikram-movie-review-lokesh-kanagarajs-enormous-fanboy-service-to-kamal-haasan-is-extremely-satisfying\/"},"modified":"2022-06-03T18:11:01","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T18:11:01","slug":"vikram-movie-review-lokesh-kanagarajs-enormous-fanboy-service-to-kamal-haasan-is-extremely-satisfying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/vikram-movie-review-lokesh-kanagarajs-enormous-fanboy-service-to-kamal-haasan-is-extremely-satisfying\/","title":{"rendered":"Vikram movie review: Lokesh Kanagaraj’s enormous fanboy service to Kamal Haasan is extremely satisfying"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tamil superstar Kamal Haasan has returned to big-screen entertainment after a gap of four years. While he was active publicly as a TV host and the leader of a political party, he couldn’t have asked for a better comeback than Vikram, which is written and directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj.<\/p>\n

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Kamal and Lokesh kept telling us that there was no connection between Vikram that came out in 1986, and the new iteration. But that is only a half-truth. Lokesh, like his other films di lui, lifts material from the cinematic well of Kamal, and reinvents it to suit the taste of the current crop of the movie-going audience. The spark for the latest Vikram came from Kamal himself. When Lokesh approached the actor to pitch a movie to him, the latter spoke of a plot idea that he had originally thought of for the 1986 movie. But, at that time, director Rajasekhar had felt the story idea was way ahead of its time and zeroed in on a different premise about an off-duty spy, who ends up preventing an airborne attack. That Vikram was Kamal’s attempt to make a Bond-like movie in Tamil, while this Vikram is very rooted in terms of culture and in the context of social and relationships, far removed from the world of Bond.<\/p>\n

Left to Kamal, he couldn’t have made the latest Vikram this good. He could perhaps have made a movie better than this version about a rogue agent going on a killing spree on a personal mission. But, that movie wouldn’t have been this enjoyable. He would have added layers upon layers to the narration, and engineered some quiet, character-building moments, giving the film an intellectual heft. Lokesh, on the other hand, keeps this film very light on the mind and eyes. The narration is fluid and nimble, replete with a plethora of fanboy moments.<\/p>\n

Kamal reprises his role as a spy named Vikram from the first movie. The film’s background, however, borrows events from Lokesh’s career-making movie Kaithi (2019). The story: Vikram and his team of spies were disgraced and hunted down by the government after a covert operation in the 1990s went sideways. Kamal and a few of his companions of him go off the radar and live in hiding for about 30 years. They no longer harbor the thirst to stop foreign attacks. All they want is to protect their loved ones from the very people they once fought to protect.<\/p>\n

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Vikram is a ghost. We know about his present life of him through vignettes of friends and acquaintances. He’s like a distorted memory, everyone seems to have a different account of his personality than him. Amar (Fahadh Faasil) runs his own cop unit, which carries out hit jobs at the behest of the government. He and his team di lui work outside the bounds of law that keep other men in uniform in check. “We don’t have any rules. If you have any, it will be broken, \u201dAmar tells before taking up the case to investigate some high-profile murders.<\/p>\n

And there is Vijay Sethupathi’s Santhanam. One character describes him as a local version of legendary drug lord Pablo Escobar. He is a cook, who produces quality narcotic drugs when he’s provided with the right raw materials. A huge consignment of raw materials goes missing, thanks to an honest cop, who works with single-minded determination to rid the society of drug menace.<\/p>\n

Amid all this chaos, where does Vikram, a rogue spy, fit in? Fans lovingly call Kamal, Andavar (God). And Lokesh is Kamal’s die-hard fan, so he has placed the latter on a pedestal, from where he’s calling the shots in the petty games played by the mortals.<\/p>\n

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