Harish Kalyan plays a young man from a fishing community who has to battle many enemies, from an uncaring government to uncaring private enterprises. The film also wants to be a larger story of a community. But nothing really works. That was the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
There are two narrative tracks in Shanmugam Muthusamy’s Diesel, which is named after the crude-oil product as well as the character Harish Kalyan plays. The first track is your typical “hero saves his neighbourhood” story. Diesel comes from a fishing community in North Madras. Their livelihood and their homes are threatened when the government constructs a massive pipeline for crude oil. This pipeline cuts through these neighbourhoods, and they need a saviour. That’s our hero. He smuggles crude oil from the pipeline and becomes the Robin Hood of his people. And our villain is a cop named Mayavel (Vinay Rai). He kills a student union leader because it’s a kind of vaccination. This killing will prevent this kid from becoming a nuisance later. The cleanest, easiest thing to do would be to set this hero up against this villain, and let us watch the fireworks.
But the director is ambitious, and we come to the second narrative track. This one wants to be a Vada Chennai for this community. It wants to be not just the story of one hero and one villain, but a saga of the various forces that are at play, right up to the ministries at the Centre. It wants to talk about private businessmen setting up harbours. It wants to talk about green energy and lithium, two crore litres of missing crude oil, and a lot of other things that include Sachin Khedekar as a sub-villain and Vivek Prasanna as a sub-sub-villain. In between all this, we have Athulya Ravi as Diesel’s love interest. She dreams of drowning and being rescued by a mermaid. He has a mermaid tattoo. It’s a match made in heaven. Or the seas. Or whatever. As always in these movies, the heroine has little to do. And even that, the writing doesn’t do well.
The result is some very convoluted and messy storytelling, with a hectic voiceover trying to fit in large chunks of historical data in between the fights and songs and noble-minded speeches by the hero. The editing is meant to be fast-paced, I think – but it comes across as frantic. We are never allowed to settle into a scene. And the scenes that do have some breathing time don’t have the content to affect us in any way. We get a stretch where Diesel and his father share a meal. They both get very emotional. We don’t. Ramesh Thilak comes and goes. Karunas comes and goes. There is no continuity, and we don’t care whether these characters live or die or swim off with mermaids. I think the effort was to give Harish Kalyan a mass-hero image. The material is definitely in there somewhere, but the writing tries to do too much and ends up doing too little.
