It finally ended, and that was the film’s high point
Parbina Rashid
Older, wiser, deadlier — that’s how fans of Indian, aka Senapathy, who is now teaching Indian martial arts in Taipei, perceives the erstwhile vigilante as they get ready to welcome him back after they find him through a social media campaign, #comebackindian.
Older, senile, brain-dead — that’s how director S Shankar seems to have perceived us, his viewers. I am not saying this without a reason.
He introduces us to Chitra (Siddharth) and his friends, Aarthi (Priya Bhavani Shankar), Thamesh (Jagan) and his girlfriend Disha (Rakul Preet Singh). They run a YouTube channel called Barking Dogs that fights corruption with satirical content. Shankar holds our hands to guide us, with case studies and preachy monologues. It takes him an agonising hour-and-a-half to get to the point.
And once Shankar decides to bring Senapathy back, a character which made Kamal Haasan a cult on-screen vigilante figure after the 1996 Tamil actioner ‘Indian’ and its Hindi version titled ‘Hindustani’, his job of explaining everything threadbare to his audience becomes a tad more serious.
Here’s a sample. A man in a cruise ship is having a good time with scantily-clad models. They are out to shoot for a calendar. We are not way off the mark when we see Vijay Mallya in that character. But what is off the mark is Senapathy’s way of punishing this corrupt business tycoon. He recites a Sanskrit shloka, hypnotises him and the Mallya-inspired character starts acting like a woman, adored with heavy gold chains, lipstick and make-up. It’s supposed to be funny. But it’s plain offensive. Finally, Senapathy puts him and us out of our misery by stabbing him.
It’s one of the few instances when Senapathy actually uses a weapon. His fingers are enough otherwise. All he has to do is touch some points of his victims’ body and they either start galloping like horses till they die of exhaustion, or sing till their vocal chords give up, or salivate till the entire body fluid is expelled through the saliva!
Quite complicated, but Shankar takes care to explain how by pressing a particular point, Senapathy makes red blood cells rush to either the heart, brain or kidney with proper graphics! Only if he had paid that much attention to the plot, the screenplay, the costumes and hairstyles of his characters.
Yes, Shankar believes in decking up his villains with gold, loads and loads of it. One even lives in a gold palace, sleeps on a gold bed and uses a toilet made of gold. Shankar must have a strong aversion to gold to associate it with all sorts of villainy. Poor metal!
The bizarre visuals get way more bizarre as Senapathy and his bête noir, a CBI officer (Vivek), play Tom and Jerry antics. As an add-on, his fans turn into foes as they hate him for brainwashing them to spot the corrupt person within their family, and hand him over to the authorities to make India corruption-free. If Chitra got his father, a vigilance bureau officer, arrested for taking bribes, in faraway Kolkata, a son got his mother arrested for putting marbles inside dead hilsa to add weight to the fish! Shankar gets the hilsa allegory right for Kolkata, but the pun wrong.
Cinematographer Ravi Varman adds his own pun. In one scene, Chitra’s father takes out his shoe and hits him repeatedly. Chitra winces, even if the shoe fails to make contact!
It comes as a relief when #gobackindian trends, but Senapathy is not the one to back out. He fights on three fronts — goons, the public and the police, with nothing but his fingers. It sounds more like a threat when he points his famous finger at us, the hapless viewers, brain-dead after a two-hour-thirty-minute third-degree session, and says, “I will be back.” No, please, no.
