As a screenplay, it’s all there – led by Rajinikanth, who seems happy not to simply play to the gallery. And yet, the film does not become what it could be. The material is there, but it doesn’t quite explode. The rest of this review may contain spoilers…
The opening credits of Vettaiyan play over the glamourised image of a gun – like in the Bond movies – and appropriately enough, we soon get to see Rajinikanth as a trigger-happy cop named Athiyan, a renowned encounter specialist. When his image appears on a presentation in a class at the National Police Academy, the students instantly recognise him. This is one of the many bits of commentary by writer-director TJ Gnanavel: there are lakhs of hardworking cops in the country, and yet, the glamourised ones – the Super Stars, so to speak – are the ones who do encounters. Here’s another valuable bit of commentary: most of the people killed in encounters are from the lower rungs of society, the marginalised who are casually dismissed by a cop here as “slum people”. It makes you stop and think for a minute. And as a thug asks, “I may be a bad man but are some of you cops any better?”
Slowly, we realise that we are being nudged away from the “glamour” of encounter killings. The film opens with a police training class being taken by someone who is against encounters. The film closes with a class being taken by a former believer in encounters who now has changed the way he thinks about extrajudicial killings. This is impressive for two reasons. One, in our cinema, a big hero is rarely allowed to be wrong or admit that he has made a mistake. You may recall the stretch in Master where the hero’s alcoholism results in the death of two boys. But offhand, nothing else comes to mind. And two, our cinema glorifies vigilante killings – and encounters come under this category of meting out justice because your conscience says so and not because the law says so. So to find a big commercial film where this is questioned is itself something of an achievement.
The interval point is brilliant – not in the sense of “shit, I never saw that twist coming!”, but in the way it deposits the hero at the wrong end of the moral spectrum. I wish there had been more emotion, more remorse, more guilt – perhaps something to be shared with his wife, played by Manju Warrier. It might have given her something solid to do – though it’s nice to see that behind her homely-housewife exterior there’s a gutsy fighter. But still, the fact that such a plot point exists is a reason for celebration. The fact the film is not burdened with songs or hero-worship callbacks is a reason for celebration. The fact that the step-by-step narrative takes the form of a procedural is a reason for celebration. Because procedurals are about the story and not about the star. Yes, we do get a few star moments, but they don’t stick out too badly.
One of my issues with this director’s Jai Bhim was that it made the hero a super-saviour who did everything single-handedly, and the film was also very high on melodrama – like cutting to a crying baby to milk emotion out of the audience. Vettaiyan is a much more dignified work. The hero is not a lone ranger. He works with a big team. There’s practically no melodrama – except for, say, the way the death of a character is written. The reason Vettaiyan is reasonably watchable is that it moves briskly. The scenes are kept short, the camera is almost always moving, the sharp edit points lead to the next bit of action / movement, and Anirudh’s pulsing score keeps pushing the pedal on the momentum. In Vettaiyan, Gnanavel shows that you can take a big issue and still treat it with a light hand (apart from a gruesome murder that’s shown repeatedly, this film’s equivalent of a crying baby). Even the lectures land (relatively) lightly.
The diverse casting helps. Ritika Singh scowls through the story as a cop, but gets a couple of decent action moves. Fahadh Faasil gets a comic character that’s as colourful as his shirts, though I did wish he’d gotten better one-liners. This is a focused screenplay. Forget the few mass moments, like the boring fights where, as usual, the goons line up one by one to get beaten up in slo-mo by the hero. The rest of Vettaiyan keeps its eyes on the target: an investigation that ends up wrong, followed by an investigation that makes things right. The character writing is pretty good. When Athiyan performs an encounter, a fellow-cop played by Kishore says, “Good shot, sir.” Later, we will get a reveal about Kishore that ties into this scene. When Dushara Vijayan’s teacher character, Saranya, writes a letter to Athiyan about drugs found at her school, she is instantly established as an activist. So the things she does later – like a crusade – fit right in.
As a screenplay, it’s all there – led by Rajinikanth, who seems happy not to simply play to the gallery. His performance here has style, yes, but it’s also helped by the substance in the story. It is not just a series of mass moments. He is both a star and a character. And yet, Vettaiyan does not become what it could be. The material is there, but it doesn’t quite explode. The film moves with mechanical efficiency, but I wished for more emotion. I wanted more than just a line of dialogue that explains why Athiyan has no children. Amitabh Bachchan looks miscast, and I wish he had been more than just a professorial type of person. I wish he had had a bit of a personal side, too. And I wish there had been more tension in the investigation. The clues are obtained too easily. The next step is found too conveniently. When a traitor is discovered, it occurs too casually.
But the bigger problem with Vettaiyan is that it is not content with handling the issue of encounter killings, and whether they are justified or not. The film wants to handle the second issue of education and expensive coaching classes and the underprivileged being mocked for not knowing English – and behind all this, we get a very weak and predictable and ineffective villain. (I don’t want to name the actor as the character is revealed quite late, but I suppose his screenshots will be all over Twitter / X by now.) The staging is bland, and the scenes needed more flavour. As of now, they are functional. They get the job done and take us cleanly to the next scene. That’s about it. But then, I was happy that at least this much got done in a big-hero movie: there’s coherence, there’s clarity, and the audience-pleasing is kept in check. Vettaiyan should have been much better, but given the low bar for star-driven films, Gnanavel has made an issue movie without sacrificing the issue at the altar of star service. That is quite an accomplishment.
