The Vishal Krishna-helmed Laththi released in Tamil on December 23 and opening in a Hindi version on December 30, is just the desi Diehard that the action lovers ordered from Santa.
Post the mid-point Laththi is excessively gruesome. But never dull. Gore is definitely preferable to bore. After the abysmally awful Cirkuslast week, I thought 2022 was going to end in the movies with no proper closure. Here comes the year-end bang-bang.
The Vishal Krishna-helmed Laththi released in Tamil on December 23 and opening in a Hindi version on December 30, is just the desi Diehard that the action lovers ordered from Santa. Let us for a while ignore the other features of this febrile story plotted with the massy enthusiasm of a Rajinikanth entertainer but with a whole lot of edge and splatter to the action that Rajini Sir cannot muster at his age.
Vishal Krishna emerges battered and blood splattered from this Dravidian take on the Bruce Willis actioners. He is Murugan a suspended police constable whose specialty it is to use the lathi during police interrogation. The wallop of the baton has never sounded more wince-worthy since Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai.
But Vishal Krishna’s universe is set far apart from Vetrimaaran’s. Here, every thwack is a threat. Every blow a clarion call. This is one bloody invasive bone shamsher where the villains are watered out of their rat holes and beaten to a pulp. That comes later. To begin with there is the ordinary workaday constable Murugan (Vishal Krishna) with a sweet spicy spouse Sunaina (played vivaciously by Kavitha) and their 10-year old son Rasu. Vishal early burly appearance and his imposing body language go well with the constable’s role.
It’s a blissful family looking for trouble. We know there is going to be a crisis in paradise. But what Vishal Krishna, his writer-director A Vinoth Kumar have planned for the extended sanguinary climax is beyond anything mass entertainment normally accommodates into its commodious clutches.
Almost the entire second-half is located at a multi-storeyed construction site which , ingeniously, becomes the location for some of the best choreographed action scenes seen in Indian cinema. Vishal takes the fall, literally. There are several moments in the bloodied battle with the baddies where he is seen literally stumbling , tumbling and injuring himself seriously during the action scenes.
This is the most committed performance I’ve seen by an action hero in an Indian film . At a time when some of Bollywood’s biggest superstars are using body doubles for their pseudo-heroic stunts, Vishal Krishna goes for the jugular, imbuing the action scenes with an inevitability and credibility which are simply unignorable.
But I must say there is too much of the sticky variety of action with goons getting their eyes and mouths impaled . A blood-dimmed tide is let loose , and it is not a pleasant sight. A bit of restraint could have gone a long way in making the action scenes more palatable.
The sequence in the middle of the mayhem where Murugan bleeds ,pleads and bleats for his son’s life is terribly mawkish and a rather vain attempt to let the emotions flow with the blood-soaked bedlam.
Nonetheless Laththi impressively initiates its elaborate action plan and implements it with an emphatic elan. I would any day end the year with full-blown action than a wimpish comedy.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
