The harder they come: "Pushpa 2 - The Rule"

Opening just before Christmas 2021, the Telugu actioner Pushpa - The Rise was one of the Indian cinema's first major post-lockdown hits, and possibly it caught some demob-happy mood: a thumpingly maximalist, three-hour tale of illegal sandalwood smuggling that often resembled Smokey and the Bandit on steroids, its rowdiness proved by turns exhilarating and exhausting. It's taken a while to assemble, but Pushpa 2 - The Rule similarly affords us scant let-up. Its opening images are of a cargo ship hitting a Japanese dock with a dull thud, and of a container that topples with a comparable crash to spill a) a near-full load of black-market logs and b) a hero prepared to go to the most extreme lengths just to reclaim a debt. "OVERLOAD" flashes a screen on one of the cranes being used to bring the containers ashore, which in this context serves both as a warning and a statement of intent on director Sukumar's part: the gangbusters success of the first film hasn't led him to tread any lighter second time around. For much of its three-and-a-quarter-hour duration, P2 only expands a cat-and-mouse pursuit drawn in cartoonishly exaggerated terms. Our eponymous anti-hero (Allu Arjun) retains his flowing mullet, the mouthful of betel nuts and the swagger of a WWE wrestler, but now thinks even bigger: turned down for a photo by a sitting MP, he will spend much of The Rule plotting to have the politician removed from office so as to get a photo taken with his successor. (The pettiness revealed in him during P1 becomes grandiose, spectacular, movie-filling here.) Tailing him wherever he stomps: the cop introduced towards the end of P1 (Fahaad Faasil), who discards the hooch bottle that helps him infiltrate the smuggler's minions on an open fire so as to spark the first of the film's eardrum-threatening explosions. Even when the characters aren't necessarily larger than life, their gestures very much are.

Nevertheless, whether it be that Sukumar's staging has improved in the past three years or that I was in a more relaxed mood than I was back in 2021, I had far more fun with The Rule than I did during The Rise. For starters, we're clearly witnessing a scale-up: the first movie's success now arms this filmmaker with hundreds of extras, vast flotillas of boats and helicopter trips to the Maldives and back, but also emboldened craft, such as a visually pleasing palette of organic pastels that veer towards the garish whenever the plot takes a lurid turn. (How wonderful it is to see an event movie that truly looks worthy of exhibition on the big screen.) Set against P1, which had to unfold outdoors due to Covid shooting restrictions, P2 showcases more interiors and intricate studio work; for its first two hours, you really do sense a franchise beginning to stretch out, luxuriate, slip elegantly costumed feet under artfully rendered tables. It's not quite indulgent, exactly, because it reflects the story arc: newly loaded woodsman Pushpa is himself coming in from the cold (or as cold as Tamil Nadu gets) by getting into politics, using the ill-gotten gains of the first movie to pay off all and sundry. Suddenly, this narrative starts to feel Little Caesar-ish, even if the protagonist's outrageous dress shirts more precisely recall De Palma's Scarface or the darts World Championship. The hubris, which you can measure whenever the smuggler bigs himself up in the third person, is broadly comparable: "Pushpa doesn't wonder if something is correct or not. He takes a decision, which proves to be correct." (The mind can only travel in the direction of certain CEOs, or those once-popular Chuck Norris memes.)

Suddenly, too, this universe seems populated by characters capable of taking this beardy rogue down a peg or two - and here we should pause to credit Arjun with humility enough to turn down P1's insistent hero worship, cede some of the movie's abundant space and allow Pushpa to be properly pushed. Sometimes it's by newly vocal wife Srivalli (Rashmika Mandanna), who insists on having the final word in any dispute and gets a whole musical number about her horniness: a real breath of fresh air after the poundingly phallic boysiness of The Rise. More often than not, it's by that pesky, dogged cop, and with his bald pate and wild eyes, Faasil conjures an especially potent form of institutionalised sociopathy, resembling Trainspotting's Begbie (or this actor's narcissist gangster from Aavesham) squeezed into uniform. After the hollow chest-thumping of P1, the franchise at last seems to have arrived at the story it wanted to tell all along: it's not just that we now have a clearly defined antagonist, someone to push back against Pushpa, it's that, in Faasil, we have a skilled performer who understands the mass form and knows how to scale his character within a generally towering movie superstructure. An unstoppable force meets an immovable object; in the scenes between the cop and the smuggler, you can almost literally see the actors wrestling for control of the film, and part of the thrill P2 elicits is that we sense this one really could go either way. Would we be disappointed if the cop finally got his man? I don't think so, because Faasil is such fun to watch in these roles, and because, after six long hours of this, the legend of Pushpa the martyr would live on regardless. 

This headlining push-me-pull-you act permits Sukumar to attempt one exquisite formal gag - the funniest thing I've witnessed inside a multiplex for some while - of a kind a director could perhaps only attempt within the generous framework of a three-and-a-quarter-hour entertainment: gleefully dashing through a scene that presents as the obvious intermission block (a tête-à-tête where the cop seeks an unlikely apology from his quarry for the closing events in P1) so that Pushpa can subsequently pull a literal U-turn and make an even bigger scene in the same location, the better to raise the stakes going into P2's final hour. Everything's set up perfectly; it's a pity, then, that in this closing stretch The Rule begins to stagger and stumble, dispatching Pushpa on what proves nothing more, in the vast scheme of things, than a sidequest contrived to initiate what the final credits reveal will be titled Pushpa 3: The Rampage. This isn't the grand showdown we looked to be heading towards; instead, we begin to sense that, unlike our tenacious anti-hero, Sukumar couldn't quite get the picture he wanted, for one reason or another. (Given P2's protracted gestation period, it's possible Faasil was simply called away to shoot elsewhere, perhaps for his supporting role in Rajnikanth's Vettaiyan: an offer he couldn't refuse.) For its closing hour, The Rule instead reverts to wayward, rowdy type: indomitable hero, women reduced to damsels-in-distress, more generic forms of antagonism. Two thunderous strides forward, one rather arbitrary and underwhelming step back. Of the current crop of Indian franchises, this is the one that - for ninety minutes in the middle of The Rule - has come closest to multiplex greatness, but it's also the one that feels most like a work-in-progress, and vulnerable to wildly fluctuating external circumstances. Third time's the charm, maybe?

Pushpa 2 - The Rule is now playing in selected cinemas.