Watch it, but fast-forward through some parts.

Vettaiyan steers clear of unconditionally qualifying “encounter killings” as the only way out — a line many Tamil films have been only too happy to tout of late. There’s in fact an instructive passage at the film’s start that’s probably deliberate. Rajinikanth’s character says there is no personal gain to be had or personal grouse to be avenged in an “encounter killing”, that a police officer who kills in this way has to suffer the “risk” of enquiries by departmental, magisterial, and human-rights commissions, and that the officer may be dismissed or “even” jailed. The choice of words here sets up a narrative whose denouement, pronounced by Rajinikanth’s character in the same scene, is the idea that police personnel are prepared to protect the people at large at risk to their own lives.

The film intercalates elements of this scene with another in which Amitabh Bachchan’s character is being persuasive in his own right about the pitfalls of “encounter killings”. The virtue of this arrangement is that it reveals a fundamental truth about the world: when a narrative triumphs, it isn’t because it has vanquished other narratives. It’s the idea that many narratives, even those at odds with each other, can be simultaneously true, and that we always have the option to choose the one we’d like to adopt — and suddenly the world could look very different. The tenets of populism can fully explain the (alleged) public support for “encounter killings” but the deeper issue is that we need people to want to adopt a different narrative of the phenomenon.

Vettaiyan uses Rajinikanth’s character to embody this arc, and attempts to bend it slowly over its 160-minute runtime to intersect with Amitabh Bachchan’s character’s demand: that we need education as a public service and that it needs to be universally accessible, so that from the more learned foundations that result, people will demand timely justice instead of a rushed one. That there are two scenes later in the narrative explicitly acknowledging the risk of “encounter killings” becoming misappropriated by vested interests — à la Vikram Vedha — is only to the writers’ credit.

In fact, since a single film has come this far, I only wish Vettaiyan also examined the belief, which Rajinikanth’s character articulates in the film without challenge, that “encounter killings” can deter similar crimes in future by scaring potential perpetrators away. Such beliefs are mistaken because they presume there is no relationship between the particulars of violent crimes and how the law punishes them, or overlook it altogether. In reality, there is ample evidence that harsher punishment for a sexual violence conviction can incentivise perpetrators to kill the victims (i.e. prevent their survival) in order to minimise the perpetrators’ chances of being caught.

Nonetheless the film’s decision to draw its driving force from sexual violence, especially gratuitous sexual violence reinforced with graphic imagery, is deeply disconcerting. Repeatedly setting up the ‘dishonouring’ of a woman as the raison d’être of the pursuit of justice is dangerous because it also sets up any crime less heinous — as deemed by the socio-cultural mores of the time — as undeserving of such pursuits. The practice of refrigeration certainly needs to end. The film also maintains the film industry’s tradition of not thinking about the tropes that concern women. The protagonist’s second in command is a woman in both phases of the film — Ritika Singh first and Rohini Molleti second — and the distribution of labour (especially of the tedious variety) and credit is correspondingly lopsided. The antagonist’s lieutenant is a woman, too.

Yet even after all these missteps — and the many others a contemporary superstar vehicle demands — on the scale of badness Vettaiyan steers clear of Annaatthe (undoubtedly Rajinikanth’s worst outing since Baba) and, importantly, of Maharaja, whose diet was even heavier on sexual violence. And to achieve all this, Vettaiyan expects us to overlook all sorts of small but mighty details, including (i) a company’s monarch storing details of the bribes he’s given on the company servers; (ii) a wasp-sized drone that could transmit high-definition images in near-real-time with what could only have been a profoundly energy-dense battery; (iii) an otherwise devious antagonist being unable to think of any ways around a protagonist who’s being a nuisance other than to offer bribes or organise hitmen; and (iv) the spectacle of one-on-one physical violence to pad the otherwise feeble arguments to suspend disbelief.

There’s a fifth detail that’s also my favourite: in many, many Tamil films (and quite possibly in films made around the country; I’m leaving them out only because I haven’t watched most of them), the protagonist has need for great public support to surmount a great challenge — and immediately finds it. I found both parts of Dhanush’s Velailla Pattadhaari completely uninspiring for this reason: both narratives would’ve gone to pot if certain social media posts hadn’t gone viral. Garnering enthusiastic public support for a common cause is an extremely valuable thing and thus quite rare in reality. But in Tamil films it happens with an astounding success rate of 100%.

“These are small prices to pay,” you say, and I’m not so sure. If it weren’t for these details, Vettaiyan would have no feet to stand on. Given a film’s claims to grandness — depicted by the scope of its characters’ actions and the virtues its makers allege the characters are showcasing — we’re often expected to overlook such details. And we do because if we apply this lens to one film at a time, it seems okay. But zoom out and a rash of films comes into view that has progressively rendered the terms of the buy-in more and more exorbitant until, at one point, we’re being asked to overlook patently absurd claims in the service of some unattainable, even deceptive, virtue. Vettaiyan, for example, would’ve had trouble just getting off the ground if that drone hadn’t or achieving any of the major leads in its central procedural without its “fight scenes”.

The film is ultimately a good hand with the misfortune of being erected as a house of cards. And the reason it doesn’t collapse at the first breeze is its principled refusal to lose sight of the corruption at the heart of “encounter killings”.

Featured image: A scene from Vettaiyan (2024). Source: Amazon Prime Video.

Spoilers abound; trigger warning: sexual violence

In case you haven't watched the film and don't plan to, you can check out the plot description on Wikipedia.

Maharaja was bad for two reasons.

First, good films don’t lie to their viewers. Maharaja did in two instances. It lied when it led viewers to believe the Selvam/Sabari storyline was contemporaneous to the Maharaja/Lakshmi storyline. Towards the film’s middle it slowly dawns on us that something’s off, followed by the epiphany that the Selvam/Sabari storyline concluded before the Maharaja/Lakshmi storyline began. What was the purpose of this switch? I can’t think of any beyond the film introducing a twist for a twist’s sake, which is disingenuous because it had no other point to it. It's a sign of the film taking its viewership for granted.

It lied the second time it becomes clear Nallasivam was the fourth person in Maharaja's house that day and we realise an ostensibly comical passage of the film has become doubly redundant — until we stop and think: what was the purpose of the film depicting Inspector Varadharajan’s phone calls at night to the various crooks asking them to take the responsibility for pilfering the dustbin?

Varadharajan would have known by then that Nallasivam was the culprit. Even if one of the crooks he phoned had agreed to own up to the crime, Varadharajan’s plan (previously hidden from the audience) to deliver Nallasivam to Maharaja’s house would have imploded. Alternatively, if Varadharajan was only fake-calling the crooks, why did we have to spend time watching their reactions? Maharaja offers this passage as comic relief, yet such relief wasn’t necessary. In fact the film could have done itself a favour by presaging Varadharajan’s plot against Nallasivam instead of blindsiding viewers at the climax.

This review benefited from inputs from and feedback by Srividya Tadepalli.

Second, the sexual violence in the film is gratuitous. It was reminiscent of Visaranai (2015) and parts of Paatal Lok (2020). It was trauma porn. We realise Selvam, Dhana, and Nallasivam grievously injured Jothi before Nallasivam raped her multiple times. Rather than simply and directly establish that the three men perpetrated sexual violence, Maharaja split up each instance of Nallasivam raping the girl into a separate scene. We sit there and watch Nallasivam perform the act of seeking Selvam’s ‘permission’, followed by Selvam’s drawling response, and Nallasivam making excuses for what he’s about to do.

It’s possible Maharaja’s writers presumed they had to lay the groundwork to justify Varadharajan’s and Maharaja’s actions later. And yet they fail when they refuse to admit a rape once is heinous enough and then fail again when they conclude people who commit heinous crimes deserve vigilante justice.

Such justice is an expression of anger, an attempt to deter future crimes with violence. But we should know by now it fails utterly when directed against sexual violence, which erupts most often in intimate settings: when the perpetrator and the survivor are familiar with each other, more broadly when the men think they can get away with it. And most of all vigilante justice fails because it punishes once the (or a rumoured) perpetrator is caught, yet most perpetrators aren’t, which led to the dismal upwelling of voices during #MeToo. The sexual crimes we hear about constitute a small minority of all such crimes out there, which is why the best way to mitigate them has been to improve social justice.

Yet films like Maharaja persist with a vengeful narrative that concludes once the violence is delivered. I fear the only outcome might be more faith in “encounter” killings. Visaranai claimed to be fact-based but the brutality in the film served no greater purpose than to illustrate such things happen. If the film was responding to a fourth estate that had failed to highlight the underlying police impunity and the powerlessness of those at society’s margins to defend themselves, it succeeded — yet it also failed when it didn’t bother to attempt any sort of triumph, of spirit if not of will. That’s why Paatal Lok and in fact Jai Bhim (2021) were better. But Maharaja is cut from Visaranai’s cloth, and worse for being a work of imagination.

In fact, Maharaja has a ‘second’ climax during which we discover Jothi is really Ammu, Selvam’s biological daughter, and whom Maharaja has been raising since his daughter, his wife, and Selvam’s wife were killed in the same accident. There are some clues at the film’s beginning as to these (intra-narrative) facts but they're ambiguous at best and in fact just disingenuous — another lie like the other plot twist.

But further yet: why? So we can watch Selvam have his lightbulb moment when he realises Jothi was Ammu and feel bad about what he did? (This was also the climax of 2023's Iratta.) Or that men should desist from such crimes because they could be harming their own daughters? Or that viewers might be duped into thinking any kind of justice has been done when Jothi shames Selvam with boilerplate lines? Consider it a third failure.