Vijay's anti-terror agent Gandhi (note the name; it matters) is already leading a dual life as we find him: a living legend in the ill-maintained offices he shares with varyingly slovenly and disreputable colleagues, he's yet to reveal his true identity to his wife (Sneha), pregnant with the couple's second child, leading her to take all her man's nocturnal creeping as evidence he must be straying elsewhere. This long-game deception quickly unravels, as Gandhi is forced to juggle a family getaway with state business: bad news for the Thai cab driver he gets gunned down in the line of duty, even worse for Gandhi's young son Jeevan (S.J. Akhilan), removed from the picture by ne'er-do-wells at the exact moment his new sister arrives into the world. (In a film this manic in its plotting, it suggests less the circle of life than drive-thru reincarnation.) Thereafter our guy must prove himself both the greatest agent and greatest father of all time; if you might hope the greatest movie star of all time would lay on a bit more originality for our troubles, the film's messaging - particularly for someone entering politics in opposition to Modi's BJP - is rarely less than on point. This Gandhi learns that in affairs of state, as with matters of the heart, honesty is forever the best policy.
The bulk of this three-hour film, co-written and directed by Venkat Prabhu, more or less represents what our multiplex-bound actioners now are: long, loud, faintly mechanical and exhausting in their insistence on an agitating setpiece every twenty minutes, and prone to sometimes questionable intelligence. ("Some random group is protesting the reopening of our embassy," Gandhi is told when he touches down in Moscow; you'd hope MI6 would do better for Bond.) Yet GOAT is also never dull, broadly likable, and elevated by those humanising touches its lead addends amid the mayhem: a dry heave after he guns down one baddie, an amused chuckle after he sets two more against one another, some awareness this is dirty or silly work for a grown man to be doing (and watching), and hidebound material that can only benefit from being loosened up. After Gandhi is relegated to desk work - necessary rite-of-passage for any screen maverick - he enters one fight scene with a schoolboy's satchel slung over his shoulder; and there follows the film's grandest, most intriguing humanising gesture, as amid the kerfuffle, he catches a glimpse of his younger self. Now we suddenly have not just two Vijays for the price of one ticket, but also find ourselves present at a standoff between the Vijay of the present and the Vijay of the past. "V squared for victory," as the lyrics of one of Yuvan Shankar Raja's thumping songs reframes it, doubtless echoing sentiments voiced in early script meetings.
It obviously helps that Vijay, fifty this year, is younger and fresher-faced than Robert De Niro was circa The Irishman, but the deaging tech here is so effective you may start to wonder whether the star is passing off his actual son in this secondary role, but no, apparently that is him in attentively airbrushed form, a microchip off the old block driven to malice by the sins of his fathers. The inclusion of this character's backstory - albeit in a film drunk on backstory, that constantly feels a need to be explaining itself - is not unpromising. For one thing, it indicates that should Vijay one day wind up becoming PM of India - not improbable, given GOAT's weekend box-office - he might well be given pause before, say, bombing Pakistan or the Middle East into near-oblivion. Where our hero differs slightly from a Bond, Bauer or Ethan Hunt is that he's not primarily driven by vengeance, rather a need to clean up after his own mistakes, whether his absentmindedness as a father or his unthinking brutality as a tool of the state. In a film that has some fun with names - minor characters adapt the codenames Bose and Nehru at various points - there is good reason Gandhi is called Gandhi: he's set to working towards the preservation of peace, be that around the family breakfast table or inside the nation's bustling cricket stadia. It is still largely a family matter, one in which we're invited to cheer the father over the son, and in which women have nothing much to do save gyrate in songs and play damsel in distress. (If SRK remains the true GOAT in this viewer's mind, that may be because he can play many selves, stock a movie this deep with references to his back catalogue, and still find room for his co-stars to shine.) Vijay, to his credit, handles each development with a brisk professionalism that itself bodes well: leave it with me, every gesture tells us, I'll clear this up and have you home in time for at least the conclusion of tonight's IPL fixture. That's not necessarily a guarantee of GOAT status, but party political broadcasts have been much less entertaining and made far worse propositions to the electorate.
GOAT: The Greatest of All Time is now showing in selected cinemas.
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