Legend Saravanan stars as a meek man whose action moves tell us that he has a past. Who was he earlier? The answer is revealed in a bland way. The movie is not entirely unwatchable. It does have some good plotting. But the making is a letdown. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
It’s Hong Kong. A criminal plan has been found out. Rocky has sent a parcel. Is Rocky a spy? There’s an explosion – the first of many explosions in this movie. Santhosh Prathap is the villain. He says that this project is his dream. We move to Thailand and then to Tuticorin, where we meet our hero, Sakthivel, played by Legend Saravanan. He is a single father, working as a car mechanic in the port area. His relationship with his daughter gives a sign that this is perhaps a self-aware film. A neighbour describes their loving bond as “cringe” – and I laughed because the things that this father and daughter do are indeed the overly sentimentalised things we see generally in Tamil cinema. Legend Saravanan is a business genius, but his acting skills are limited to mouth movement – the rest of his face is frozen. I thought writer-director RS Durai Senthilkumar had written a movie around this limitation. I thought we were in for a Tamizh Padam-like spoof of Tamil cinema’s globe-trotting action thrillers.
But the film plays it straight – and not straight enough to make us take it seriously. Take the scene where a birthday cake explodes. Of all the places you could hide a bomb, why choose a birthday cake which will explode only if the candle is lit? What if the cake fell down on the way to the house? What if the neighbourhood serial cake-thief stole it, the backstory being that his parents never celebrated his birthday and he takes his revenge by stabbing other people’s birthday cakes? But even if we assume that the villain has a thing for dessert, and that his next move will be to shove dynamite into a doughnut, the scene does not carry any suspense. Leader is a well-plotted movie in terms of story, but the screenplay is saggy and the direction is flabby. There’s no thrill, no nail-biting, no “aha” moment, no sense of tragedy about collateral damage. When the cake explodes, you just feel bad for the icing.
Andrea Jeremiah plays a cop who concludes that this explosion is not an accident but a “planned murder”. I mean, no shit, Sherlock! It’s a cake, not an LPG cylinder! How can this explosion be an accident? Anyway, she is convinced something is happening in the container yard at the port, and her instincts are right. There’s some ammonium nitrate that was used in some blasts in Lebanon. But the random foreign place that takes the, um, cake is a fictional country called Elargia. Maybe they didn’t want to offend any actual country by calling it a terrorist hub. Or maybe it’s a “mass” thing! Our hero is such a globetrotter that he trots to places that are not even on the globe! That must be it. Like many movies where a meek man is exposed as having a colourful past, we get a flashback where we learn who Sakthivel was. He is described as a ruthless man, probably for the benefit of all those who missed the gory action scenes that came earlier, where Sakthivel single-handedly took on hordes of evil men with a single expression.
To give Legend Saravanan credit, he does not shout and scream and go ballistic and try to “emote”. He underplays his part. He is like a man whose life experiences have drained all emotion out of him and is reduced to a robot. Whether intentional or not, this approach works to the extent that he doesn’t become the source of unintentional comedy. And the film does have its moments. There’s a fight that plays out entirely as a series of reaction shots. We register the hero’s heroism not through his moves but through the eyes of an observer. That’s a nice way of not overdoing the action choreography. I also liked the plot point that a character has a condition called dextrocardia, which means the heart is on the right side of the chest. And another character sees his loved one in everyone – so if you have to save your daughter in a crowd and all the faces in the crowd look like your daughter’s face, then who do you save? I liked the way the Santhosh Prathap character was thought out. But these ideas needed to be fleshed out better. Finally, we are in a movie where killers in black suits brandish samurai swords inside a Vande Bharat train speeding from Tirunelveli to Chennai. Even if we keep trying to take things seriously, the cake explodes in our face.
