Veera Dheera Sooran: Part 2 Movie Review: This intense actioner builds intrigue by the minute
This intense actioner builds intrigue by the minute(3.5 / 5)
The beginning of Veera Dheera Sooran: Part 2 feels like you are eavesdropping on an interesting conversation between strangers on a train. You don’t know the context, you don’t know their personalities, of the people they are talking about, or their world, but if the tone is right and the story intriguing, you cannot help but get pulled in. SU Arunkumar’s film is thankfully devoid of the guilt of being a nosy co-passenger and is full of indulgent fun. Straight out of the gate, the director presents us with the joy of unravelling the story on our own. It feels like we are dropped in the middle of the third act. It is the eve of a town festival and an agitated woman drags her young daughter to what seems to be the house of a godfather-like figure and proceeds to blame his family for her husband’s disappearance. We don't necessarily know if we are going to travel with these characters for the length of the story. We don’t know the scale of the scuffle unfolding. For once, the characters talk to each other and not to the audience; dialogues are smart enough not to be painfully obvious exposition dumps, and so we piece information together and figure out the context on our own. There is no hurry to explain anything to us and the film is largely alluring for that confidence alone. While the distraught wife is fighting with the family, one of the men is kind enough to fix a plate of barbecue for the daughter. We are not sure whose side to take, everyone is painted grey. There is no large, glaring context, and therein lies the intrigue of the film.
Director: SU Arunkumar
Cast: Vikram, Dushara Vijayan, SJ Suryah, Suraj Venjaramoodu
Instead of cookie-cutter character arcs—where we see the character starting somewhere, going through a change, and then ultimately transforming—we go through our own journey of understanding the facets of a character. The best example of this comes with the IPS officer played by SJ Suryah. He starts off as a sincere police officer, and then we see him as a man gripped by revenge, an instigator of chaos with calculated malevolence, an unfortunate pawn in a powerplay, and then a self-serving manipulator. Sj Suryah dials down his signature eccentricity and somehow amplifies the kaleidoscopic dimensions of his character. Almost no character is unidimensional, even Kaali’s (Vikram) sensible, loving wife, Kalaivaani (Dushara Vijayan) picks up the knife at one point. And it never comes across as a lazy effort to elevate ‘the hero’s pair’, to show you how much the director cares about representing a character oft-ignored in films. The screenplay respects Kalaivaani by placing genuine interest in her character, infusing her dialogues with enough authenticity, and does not treat her as a popular trope or a checklist to be ticked off. And this earnestness seeps down to even the smallest of characters and character moments. For example, Kaali is having an important conversation with someone, and it is briefly interrupted while his son runs around and trips on the floor. These little moments, that doesn't always add to the overall storytelling, build authenticity to the world of the story, by telling you that for once in a Tamil commercial action entertainer, the world doesn’t revolve around the protagonist for him to shine as a ‘hero’. He does that even within the confines of his grimy, rustic, not-so-perfect world, one which isn’t made as his convenient playground.
Vikram’s Kaali stands tall as a wonderful irony in a world as realistic as the one he inhabits in Veera Dheera Sooran. He is still your typical commercial cinema protagonist who stays one step ahead of everyone, who goes to any length to protect his loved ones, who can walk into a police station and still flip everything in a second so he is in charge of the room. But the calculated distance between his larger-than-life persona and the multi-dimensionality of his world provides an alluring juxtaposition rather than a jarring contrast. He still operates within the confines of the story world. It is incredibly exciting when Kaali opens a crate of landmines, something a small-town henchman (no matter how powerful) cannot easily get his hands on. However, since the world seems incredibly grounded, we cannot help but imagine the exploits Kaali could have gone through to get his hands on what seems to be army-issue landmines. Most of the backstory is processed unconsciously, within the implicit confines of our own imagination, which is probably why we embrace the over-the-top heroisms instead of questioning the logical leaps because a part of our own imagination is mixed in, like a vaccine using a strain of the virus. The only element that drags down the film is its length, which is unfortunately felt during Arunkumar’s experimentation with a one-shot sequence right before the climax. While it does not feel like vacuous ornamentation, it still doesn’t justify its own existence, the sequence is competently orchestrated but never feels gripping enough.
Veera Dheera Sooran: Part 2 feels like Arunkumar is throwing things at you from the top of a speeding train while you are driving a car. As you figure out that the things he is throwing at you are jigsaw puzzle pieces, you realise the intense curiosity welling up inside that compels you to chase the train and complete the puzzle, and thankfully, the completed puzzle is as exciting as the chase itself.