Suriya is in full star mode… and god mode. He plays a deity who comes to earth when courtroom corruption makes justice a joke. He clashes with a lawyer played by RJ Balaji, who is the villain. The writing has many clever concepts, but the film also wants to keep doing fan service. The result is not what the premise deserved, and even taken simply at a “mass” level, it’s what we have seen many times before. That’s the quick review. A detailed analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
In RJ Balaji’s new film, Suriya plays a god: a literal god named Vettai Karuppu Saamy. So the big question while going into Karuppu is this. What’s the big deal? In Hollywood, the rules for a superhero with superpowers are different. You need a reason to become someone with godlike abilities. You need to be bitten by a radioactive spider. Or you need to be a native of Krypton, so that you can use earth’s gravity to fly. But in our films, the hero is born a superhero. From MGR to Rajinikanth to Vijay and Ajith, our action heroes are already endowed with the powers to single-handedly overcome twenty men. So what are Balaji and his writers going to do with the idea that their hero is literally a god? Or in other words, what is Suriya going to do in Karuppu that Suriya has not already done as a human in, say, the Singam franchise?
And that’s where the interesting ideas begin. At the purely conceptual level, Karuppu has a lot going for it. The god that Suriya plays is an “ellai saamy”, which means that his powers do not apply beyond the borders of his jurisdiction, so to speak. Another interesting idea is to set the movie in a courtroom, which is literally a place of judgement – which is what a god does. Another interesting idea is to have Balaji play a corrupt lawyer who’s the devil incarnate. His name is Baby Kannan. When he first meets Karuppu, who is in the form of an angry god, he is shaken but he quickly recovers and throws a challenge. At the concept level, it is nice to have a villain who is not a dummy but a man who can possibly out-scheme a god. Hero and villain – god and devil – are evenly matched. Even small scenes show signs of clever thinking. At one point, you think a desperate father is going to console his daughter that god will help them. Instead, the scene ends with a line from Pokkiri.
Indrans plays this father, a version of the Manorama character from Indian. He goes from pillar to post in search of justice. Indrans and Anagha Maya Ravi, who plays the daughter, are the two most human characters in the film and they give the two best performances in it. At least in Indian, the older Kamal Haasan character kept punishing the sinners. But what if Karuppu, here, had no powers in certain situations? What if god had to reduce himself to a human, and fight with the devil at a human scale, with no extra advantage of having superpowers? This is a terrific story, and a perfect fit for Suriya’s star presence. But the constant meta references and the generic action blocks and the template “mass”-ness reduce the impact. We keep getting a Jai Bhim song, or an LKG callback, or a nod to Leo, or a joke about Ilaiyaaraja’s tendency to sue filmmakers using his songs without permission. As for the fights, we get the same tiring visuals we have seen many times earlier, that of men flying into the air after a punch. The brilliance of the concept and the many ideas in it don’t become uniquely “divine” situations. Except for a fight at a border, the film is content to coast along with simple solutions.
The courtroom scenes lack the interesting surprises that such dramas need, like a surprise witness pulled out at the last minute. A stretch inspired by Liar Liar is not as funny as it should have been. The fact that the heroine (Trisha) knows that Suriya is god is not used in any clever way. It would have been nice to see a playful, romantic side to this god, who is almost always in indignant mode. Karuppu wants to have it both ways. When goons approach our god in a train, we get the Sai Abhyankkar-scored action that makes fans whistle but we also get a sobering reminder about reality. Karuppu wants to tell an unusual story but it also wants to keep fans cheering. And that flattens the film into a generic series of “mass” moments. I really liked how the villain is almost psychotic in his determination to win, but this specificity in writing is missing when it comes to the characterisation of the hero. Or the heroine. Or, indeed, any of the other characters, many of whom are reduced to deliverers of reaction shots whose lip-sync is often off.
Another thing that works against the film is the bland way in which the potentially emotional moments are treated. There’s a girl who needs a liver transplant. There’s a woman who has been sexually harassed by her employer. There is a judge who keeps commenting on the clothes women wear in his courtroom. It is nice to see Suriya get a proper star vehicle after a while, and he’s good – but if you want to keep doing fan service, maybe you should just tinker around with a template story and not try to be too clever with it. The touch where Suriya appears as a god in someone’s dream, or in someone’s drug-scrambled hallucination, belongs in a better movie – one that embraces the god idea in all earnestness. Karuppu is content to see its star in “god mode”, and while that may be enough for a few theatre highs (shot well by GK Vishnu), it doesn’t make for a consistently interesting movie.
