In Coolie, Lokesh Kanagaraj's old tricks fail to work
One can certainly be sure that Lokesh Kanagaraj considers the gun mightier than the pen. Because since 'Kaithi' (2019), he hasn't attempted to write a fully convincing screenplay. Instead, he tries to distract the audience from his hollow screenplays with an unrelenting series of gunshots, deep knife cuts, excessive blood splutter or the casual dismemberment of body parts.
And if this wasn't enough, he knew how to constantly tease the audience with either LCU (Lokesh Cinematic Universe) connections or the potential possibility of them. All this leading to an overload of fan theories and expectations that conveniently filled the glaring gaps in Kanagaraj's screenplays. However, in his standalone film 'Coolie', he tries to push luck beyond the already generous tolerance of the audience and the same tricks that helped his earlier films fail to work here.
In 'Coolie', he takes a generic story of friendship and revenge - and adds two dozen unnecessary detours to make the narrative look more complex and clever than it actually is. However, these detours make the film extremely directionless and even pointless. And to makes things worse, the basic premise of friendship between Rajinikanth and Sathyaraj’s characters is never worked upon. In fact, the screenplay is unable to build the narrative organically or logically and move ahead with convincing drama. Instead, every now and then, we have one of the characters spouting lengthy explanatory dialogues to tell us where the story is heading. But even here, the dialogues lack any spark and come across as very banal.
It is in such a poorly written film that Rajinikanth tries his best to keep the audience interested with his presence and energy. Thankfully, the actor looks very present here, compared to his other recent films. And this keeps the audience from not losing their patience completely. However, this cannot be said about the other actors. The film was aggressively promoted as a multi-starrer, with popular actors from other films industries in the country. But their characters are neither fleshed out well nor these actors offered anything substantial to do - except for appearing in interesting looking costumes. In particular, the hyped-up antagonist characters Simon and Dahaa - played by actors Nagarjuna and Aamir Khan shockingly evoke laughter than any fear. Even when Soubin Shahir breathes life into his role as Dayalan, his character arc is cut short by shifting the attention to another actor related to him, post which Shahir's character becomes disposable to the proceedings.
While there isn't much to complain about Anirudh's music or Girish Gangadharan's cinematography, they are unable to standout or do anything extraordinary. Even the several action sequences come across as very generically choreographed. In fact, things that have so far worked in Lokesh's films - the narrative style of going forward and back with the story's timeline, use of retro songs to accompany violent actions scenes, introducing surprise twists to characters and sequences - they all uniformly fall flat here.
We are told that film is about a luxury watch smuggling business happening at the port leased by Nagarjuna's character, which is then led to an illegal heart transplant secret, an electric chair and a backstory about Rajinikanth being a coolie - who supposedly saved other workers during a serious conflict. But none of this is shown with even the slightest depth, so none of them make us feel anything. It wouldn't be a surprise if Lokesh himself wasn't convinced of any of this. What he merely does is to throw one trick after another at the audience hoping that at least some of them might work. Because they don’t, what we end up witnessing is a prolonged intermission block and climax sequence that leaves us more confused and tired than thrilled.
Once the film ended, it was tempting to wonder if the film exposed its weakness by mounting it as standalone film. Because in the case of his earlier films belonging to LCU, the filmmaker was able to excite the audience with characters from one film appearing in another in some form. And such connections enabled viewers to build on the premise and construct infinitely entertaining fan theories. But in the absence of such a LCU premise, ‘Coolie’ seems to have brazenly revealed its weaknesses.
