Cop out: "Vettaiyan"

This year's vehicle for Tamil cinema's self-billed "Superstar" Rajnikanth, Vettaiyan, opens with a state-of-the-nation address - given to a coterie of trainee cops by Hindi superstar Amitabh Bachchan, in his role as a human-rights scholar - on the broad theme of "what's wrong with India?" The lecture, which sometimes sounds indistinguishable from an old man's list of gripes, covers a fair amount of ground: post-colonial hang-ups, hangovers from the pre-colonial caste system, corrupt cops and administrators, failed children running amok on Tik-Tok. Some valid points are landed, but the two-and-a-half hours that follow suggest writer-director T.J. Gnanavel is using these observations to lend depth, scope and a degree of sociopolitical heft to what chiefly plays like standard-issue police procedural with a dash of copaganda. Rajnikanth's supercop Athiyan will, you sense, clear up some or all of the above, by hook or by crook, over the course of this professionally mounted tranche of escapism; the kind of supercool movie creation who employs a Horlicks-huffing trickster (Aavesham's Fahadh Faasil, continuing his mission to have more fun on screen than anyone in South Indian cinema) as his right-hand man, Athiyan lets a druglord escape from custody - and even shoot a uniformed officer - so as to make for a more propulsive recapture. It's all fun and games until the rape-murder of a schoolteacher framed as the bedrock of any enlightened state ties the movie's initially straggly strands together. Our brash hero shoots an innocent suspect dead in the aftermath and finds himself dogged by Bachchan's judge, whereby Gnanavel momentarily begins to complicate what appears to be his premise: Rajnikanth putting the country to rights.

That we're swept up in this process is mainly down to an admirable sense of pace. Rattling along to a terrific Anirudh Ravichander score whenever evidence has to be compiled in montage, Vettaiyan boasts the ambient pleasures of some Chennai-set CSI spin-off. It never lacks for character, either, even if that manifests in the often ridiculous syntax of the mass movie: Athiyan has the David Caruso-like habit of flipping on his clip-on sunglasses, typically to a rousing song cue underlining his general fanciness. The issue, evident even from said cues, is that the social critique set up by that opening is allowed to go only so far; whenever Athiyan starts to look especially reckless, Gnanavel timidly pulls back and defaults to the sight of a superstar kicking ne'er-do-well ass. "It's not haste, it's speed," Faasil's hypeman notes of the cop's methodology: yes, a few more bodies might have to be dropped along the way, but - hey, rest assured - this guy gets results. The sense is of an at least slightly tougher and grittier film that got compromised the minute Rajnikanth signed on; Vettaiyan is so determined to deliver the requisite hero moments it loses sight of the many more interesting directions this scenario could have been pushed in. For a while, it looks as if the character will be properly haunted by or challenged for his actions - or that he might challenge viewer complicity, as Dirty Harry and the Bad Lieutenant did. But no: the second half is altogether easy on its protagonist and too easy for Rajnikanth, who gets to strike much the same poses he must have done in at least a dozen previous star vehicles. It's a pity, because a more energised Bachchan might have been exactly the co-star to do the challenging; as it is, the judge is sidelined upon the introduction of a third star (Rana Daggubati as a tech bro exploring murderous measures to get teaching done online) and then recalled to pat our wayward hero on the back. The writing goes in circles: a case gets closed every twenty minutes, only for a few pages to fall out and create an even bigger mess, and after three or four passes at this, it's all contrivance. Entertaining contrivance, granted, and staged with a basic competency that nowadays presents as a luxury in the multiplex: Gnanavel somehow even gets us to suspend our disbelief that the stout septuagenarian Rajni might best the hulking Daggubati in hand-to-hand combat. Yet Vettaiyan probably won't go down as a Superstar classic for one simple reason: having set up so many potentially fascinating lines of inquiry, it picks the most conventional of all. It hears out those mountainous gripes, then spends two-and-a-half hours energetically patting down a molehill.

Vettaiyan is now playing in selected cinemas.