Indian 2 Review: Indian Thatha Returns Without Fangs In A Flashier Sequel

Writer and Director: S Shankar

Cast: Kamal Haasan, Siddharth, SJ Suryah, Rakul Preet Singh, Priya Bhavani Shankar

Duration: 150 mins

Available in: Theatres

What made Senapathi, a greying father of two, a complicated yet superior superhero in Shankar’s Indian thirty years back was not the fact that he could kill people at 70 or put the fear of God in people while slitting the throat of a doctor on national television. Behind his tough exterior, Shankar’s hero wore the wounds of his past like an armour — the grief of being used to losing his loved ones in the freedom struggle translated brilliantly to the present, where he goes on to kill even his son for the greater good. In Senapathi’s hands, the varma kalai was a mere accessory that elevated his superpower, that is his grit. In Indian 2, Kamal Haasan’s Senapathi is stripped of this superpower. The stoic hero is left to purr.

It’s easy to see why Shankar wanted to bring back the Indian thatha. In 1996, Shankar gave Tamil cinema a vigilante hero to talk about issues that chip away at our country — this went on to become a trope, with directors emulating Senapathi with their own stock vigilante heroes. The India of 2024 is different from the India of 1996. The world is more polarised than ever before today, but the director chooses to focus on the issues that have remained the same — corruption, medical negligence, educational fraud and so on.

But even if the world in the film has moved on — we have AI standing in for the brilliance of actors such as Nedumudi Venu, incredible prosthetic and makeup work to make a centenarian look cool, and polished stunts — the treatment remains terribly conventional. Elaborate scenes and monologues (was Senapathi ever so chatty?) are stitched up to make this 100-something messiah cool, while the film forgets the one thing that actually made him unique: his personality.

In Senapathi’s attempt to clean up the country yet another time, he becomes a social media crusader. If the relatively younger generation was lawless in the first part (his son Chandru is a corrupt brake officer), the boomer generation grows up to stay corrupt in the sequel. So, he rallies up the youngsters to throw out the leeches. Helping him in this fight is a reformist  YouTube channel called Barking Dogs, headed by Siddharth’s Chitra Aravindan, the son of an anti-corruption government officer (Samuthirakani). But when Indian thatha directs these youngsters to clean up their own house before the world, his plan starts to backfire. The fickleness of social media and the complexities of living with crooked yet loving parents is explored with some amount of effort in the film. 

In a superb nod to the first part, a man isn’t allowed to perform the last rights of a loved one for placing the world before his family. But again, none of these details let the characters leap — apart from Siddharth’s Chithra who has a moving backstory with his mother — because in the end they are over-the-top caricatures. SJ Suryah gets a glorified cameo as a ravenous villain who is decked up in gold — a detail that’s included to probably make us believe he is a criminal, there is another granite bigwig who relieves himself in a pot made of gold.

Indian was by no means a perfect film. It was still a film drenched in sexual innuendos — a marker of films from a particular time. But it still had just the right amount of rigour that made us root for its far-fetched world where a timeworn veteran could kick a man or two. Sujatha’s dialogue also made these characters firmly grounded to reality. Sure, Chandru accepts bribes to get ahead in life, but a streak of shame instantly crosses his face when his blunders cost the lives of children. It was a film that explored the penalty of being a bad and a good person. The sequel has no space for such deep dualities. It focuses on “weapons” of revolution such as “social media” and “varma kalai (an artform that gets disturbing iterations including a transphobic varmam)” instead of the revolution itself. No amount of modernisation can save a film that’s so deeply conservative at heart.