'Thunivu' movie review: Some guts and no glory

Thunivu

Tamil (Theatres)

Director: H Vinoth

Cast: Ajith Kumar, Manju Warrier, Bagavathi Perumal

Rating: 2.5/5

The frenetically staged first act of Thunivu, writer-director H Vinoth’s heist thriller headlined by Ajith Kumar, does not pause to offer explainers.

There is a bank, a few men who are in there to rob it, and there is this inscrutable intruder in their midst, switching between madcap showboat and elite killer, breaking only for his dance moves. By the time this setting is established, Vinoth has validated his choice of tone which is at once dark and facetious.

The action around the heist comes interspersed with a terrific track of black humour involving a corrupt TV journalist (Mohana Sundaram) and a corrupt cop (Bucks). They walk around burning cars and debris striking their own deals of mutual gain, assured and businesslike.

The half-playful approach helps in holding this seemingly scattershot narrative together and puts the nameless, past-less protagonist on course for a worthy backstory.

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This is a star vehicle with all eyes on its lead actor; Ajith reactivates his Mankatha-mode here, playing the cool criminal with a self-awareness that would look ungainly on most of his contemporaries. There is unabashed fan-service (who da gangsta?, asks the mandatory hero-elevation song) and the character build-ups, more glaringly with the men who are introduced as villains, are generic (the film has its own, interesting play with the hero-villain dynamic though). The x2 pace at which things unfold does not pull you enough into the plot.

The lack of exposition works, for a while, in the story of a man who has Dark Devil for a moniker. His relationship with Kanmani (Manju Warrier, at ease with the guns and the general badassery) is never spoken about either. She calls him partner and when he wants her to survive a gunshot injury, all he needs to tell her is, “remember who we are”.

The film, rather curiously, breaks halfway to adopt the sensibilities of a Shankar film. The story, about banks, credit card debts and contract fine print, is told in scenes that dully pitch the right against the wrong. Its unraveling, by a masked narrator for live TV, is even drearier. As the slickly paced crime drama drifts to the cinematic trappings of working-class outrage, Thunivu heads for a rough landing.

For a good part of its runtime, the film plays to the familiar beat. It manages to be entertaining even when it takes a by-the-numbers route for the big action set-pieces – choppers, VFX, expansive aerial shots of boat chases, the works. Vinoth discards the inspired madness of the film’s initial portions for a more structured final act, but only to tell a familiar story of corporate crime, social exclusion, and a facile antidote – vigilante justice.

He does put together a decent highlight-reel for his star who appears to relish playing men in morally ambiguous spaces. There, however, was more fun to be had with a hard reset. With a toning-down of the contracted criminal’s moral play, this could have been that rare guts-and-glory film led by a man flawed, and flaunting it.