Thursday, 24 April 2025

A fistful of Skittles: "Good Bad Ugly"


Good Bad Ugly
 is a prominent example of those fan-service star vehicles that have become specific to the Indian cinema over recent years. If you catch it in a multiplex, it'll likely be preceded by the trailer for the next/last Mission: Impossible, which isn't quite the same thing: people go to see those films for Tom Cruise, yes, but they also go for the stunts, the supporting cast and/or the entire package, and Cruise is playing Ethan Hunt rather than some amalgamation of every role he's played. Here, the star is the entire package: Tamil audiences go to see Ajith Kumar - the foursquare, salt-and-pepper-haired action hero who resembles Ray Winstone playing John Virgo - performing the most Ajith Kumar feats imaginable in the most maximalist of Ajith Kumar films. (To put it another way: if Cruise were to make one of these, he'd have to end one setpiece with a "respect the cock" gag, have minor characters repeatedly cast aspersions on his sexuality, and at some point make a winking reference to David Miscavige's wife.) I'm late to the cult of AK, but as far as I can discern, he's not undeserving of such treatment: I enjoyed his post-pandemic Marxist heist movie Thunivu, it was a smart idea to remake the Kurt Russell thriller Breakdown (as this year's Vidaamuyarchi) and more generally Kumar has combined flair and heft with a broadly upstanding public persona. His latest is nothing if not straightahead in its hero worship. From an opening section headed 'Good', we gather Kumar's ex-gangster AK has walked himself into a prison framed like a Marvel comic strip and choreographed as if by Bob Fosse, where he's so renounced his old ways he's even taken night shift work as a guard. In 'Bad', his return to civvy street is complicated after his moptopped teenage son (Karthikeya Dev) is snatched by ne'er-do-wells and nogoodniks. As AK goes full Liam Neeson, investigating the flow of dark money through the Spain of Money Heist and paella Western shootouts, things turn - you guessed it - 'Ugly'.

They get funny and entertaining, too, at least for some while. Let's make no bones about this: Good Bad Ugly is nonsense on toast - naansense, if you wanted to be culturally specific - but in no other form of contemporary cinema has the phrase "what if" been seen to hold such sway. What if a 53-year-old man could be observed kicking seven bells out of men thirty years his junior? What if the latter group were dressed like characters rejected from Scarface for being a bit much? What if we disguised AK in leather-bar garb for a meeting with money launderers? What if those money launderers did their bidding in a What'sApp groupchat headed "DARK WORLD"? What if their casino hangout had a microwave in the middle of it, which our hero could then toss a bomb inside? What if that hero had a gun disguised as a Box Brownie camera? It's like a story an eight-year-old would make up about themselves and their friends - which may explain the comic-book panels that sporadically pop up, and the action figures on AK's table, and the Korean heavy with the Hello Kitty phone. (It may also explain the cuts the film's UK distributor made at the end of Week One, softening a 15 certificate movie to a family-oriented 12A.) That's the source of GBU's appeal: the possibilities are endless. (One scene ends with Kumar casually chatting to the camera crew.) It also struck me as GBU's limitation: like a kid hopped up on Skittles, it eventually tires itself out, and exhausts those of us who aren't hardcore fans with it. Director Adhik Ravichandran and his six-strong team (I'm tempted to say creche) of writers have their strongest ideas in the first half; in the absence of anything like a coherent, thought-through plot, the supply of Super-Cool Things for Our Hero To Do runs thin after the intermission. The second half really does suggest the star and his entourage took a nice European break, during which some killjoy occasionally pulled out a camera and some prop guns and insisted AK film something for the fanclub. The prevailing air of daftness remains rather charming, though: it's the first Indian film I've seen to remind me of both John Wick and the Status Quo lark Bula Quo!.

Good Bad Ugly is now playing in selected cinemas.

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