The globe-trotting imagination is epic, but despite good performances, the film does not connect at a human, emotional level. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Imagine a scene where a man gets a call that the people who wiped out his family have been found, and he can finally have his revenge. How would you stage this moment? At the most basic level, all this scene needs is a shot of the caller, and a shot of the person receiving this call. Right? But that’s not enough for director Prithviraj Sukumaran. Under his staging, the scene is set in the deserts of Yemen, where this man – this revenge-seeking man – is standing tall on a dune. He is looking at three black cars, whose wheels are sending the sand flying in slow-motion. He gets the call. He gets the news. And then, he gets to save a little girl, just like he was saved as a little boy. The opening of the scene is epic. The ending is (meant to be) intimate. Multiply this feel over three hours, and you get Empuraan.
This sequel to Lucifer – written, again, by Murali Gopy – is not a movie. It’s a kind of mission statement. It’s Prithviraj making an announcement that Malayalam cinema is not just the quaint little “human stories” that we like to applaud. This story is rooted in Kerala politics, and yet it has offshoots to Northern Iraq, the MI6 headquarters in London, the 2002 violence in Gujarat, Chinese satellites and triad gangsters, and the idea of Indian nationhood. Early in the film, a Muslim man and a Hindu woman wish each other well. “Allah aap ko salamat rakhe,” he says. She replies, “Ram tumhari raksha kare.” Empuraan talks about how forces of communalism have torn apart the religious harmony we once took for granted. At least in terms of what it sets out to do, the film is an epic – not just in size and scale but also in terms of how much it wants to say about geopolitics. But how is the actual movie?
Let’s begin with a recap. At first, Part 1 – that is, Lucifer – seemed like a lot: a lot of characters needing a lot of exposition, set amidst a lot of political developments, underlined by a lot of Biblical quotes, with a lot of time transitions and flashbacks in Murali Gopy’s ambitious screenplay. But eventually, the film settled into a solid, pulpy family drama. There’s a beloved patriarch, PK Ramdas (Sachin Khedekar), Chief Minister of Kerala and head of the IUF party. When PK Ramdas dies, his daughter Priya and son Jathin (Manju Warrier and Tovino Thomas) are next in line, along with a wild card in the form of the patriarch’s informally adopted son, Stephen Nedumbally (Mohanlal). Some very effective “who is the next CM?” drama, especially in the scenes with Jathin, took us to the end – but (intentionally) we were left with more questions than answers.
For instance, who is this enigmatic Stephen Nedumbally? The first time we saw Stephen, he is in all-white, and by the end, he is all black, head to toe. Like the Biblical Lucifer, we see that he is a fallen angel, though his fall is not from heaven. This earth is hellish enough. As Stephen says, this is not a battle between good and evil, but between evil and evil. Some clever advertisers may have labelled Kerala God’s Own Country, but it could well be Satan’s Own Country. But if we look beyond these asides and abstractions, who is Stephen, and how did this poor little orphan boy turn into Khureshi Ab’ram, the international crime lord hunted by Interpol? For that matter, was he an orphan in the first place? What is Stephen Nedumbally’s real connection to the patriarch-figure, PK Ramdas? Who is the mother whose tomb we saw Stephen sitting on?
When Stephen is asked about the unknown chapters of his life, he points to Jesus, and asks if anyone knows about the missing years in The Lord’s life! Does this mean that, as with God, the life of Lucifer, too, has its mysteries? And what about Zayed Masood (played by the director as a near-robotic man, stripped of feeling)? Is he more than just an enforcer? Other than clearing the path for his boss, through violent means, what’s his story? It was easy to make some psychological connections. For instance, we could guess that Stephen exploded with rage at the cop who ill-treated an orphan child because he knows what it’s like to be an orphan child. (And note that Zayed, too, is an orphan.) At that moment, Stephen is like any “mass hero”, a strong person protecting the weak. But in the usual mass movies, the saviours are good people, while Stephen is the first to admit that he comes in shades of grey.
In Empuraan, set five years after the events of Lucifer, the all-black angel rises again. We also see him in half black, half white, a black shirt over his spotless mundu. But by now, Stephen can never be mistaken for an all-white angel. In the first movie, Stephen appeared 30 minutes in. Here, it’s almost an hour before we see the man. But everything that happens has his fingerprints. He is a master puppeteer, as the journalist played by Indrajith Sukumaran realises. When this kurta-wearing character gets to face Stephen Nedumbally, he is draped in a Louis Vuitton shawl. They really meant it when they said no expense has been spared. But unlike the first part, the human elements don’t connect with us. For instance, we see that the CM of Kerala (Tovino Thomas, who is very good) is no longer the good man he was. He is now associated with saffron parties. But how and why did this change occur? We get a quote at the beginning: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But is that enough?
The screenplay throws in many faces and names, and many actors (like Suraj Venjaramoodu) end up being terribly underused. Every scene, every event is treated like a mini-epic, with slo-mo and a gliding camera and several reaction shots of actors dropping their jaws to register the enormity of what is happening. But it is only in the scenes with the superb Manju Warrier (who’s dignity personified) that we feel the story taking a new direction. This should have been her story, the story of a sister who decides to challenge her wayward brother with the help of Stephen – but Empuraan keeps cutting away to so many worldwide occurrences that this arc doesn’t stand out, and it never feels as powerful as it should. I can see why they wanted this sense of global interconnectedness – to show that what happens in Kerala isn’t just a local matter. We are all influenced by things happening everywhere. But these “things”, these incidents around drug cartels and spy agencies, are all chaotically written (some scenes make us wonder why they even exist!) and what we end up with is a fan-service movie to Mohanlal.
Prithviraj did say that Lucifer was his way of making a fanboy tribute to Mohanlal, and all the mass scenes – despite being overextended – do work. I especially liked the near-miraculous touch of a burning tree forming the “L” sign (L for Lucifer). And Mohanlal owns this role like a boss, never more so than in the scene where he utters the “L word” with a knowing twinkle in his eyes. He’s acting to his co-star as well as to his audience. But the second part of a movie has to be much more than a fanboy tribute. It needs emotional resonance. We get Zayed Masood’s backstory, but it is very generic. At one point, Stephen tells Zayed, “Rehmat se jo khush woh khuda / Badla se jo khush woh insaan.” He’s essentially saying that kindness and compassion are for the gods. But we are mere men. We need revenge. It’s a fantastic masala moment that shapes character through dialogue. But other than a few such scattered bits, Empuraan is essentially a lead-up to Part 3. Maybe after the trilogy is done, we will look back at Empuraan with greater clarity, but for now, it’s an epic whose ambitions lie beyond its grasp.
