Left to their own devices: "Patriot"

From a commercial perspective, it's little surprise Mahesh Narayanan's Malayalam film Patriot made the UK Top Ten this past weekend: it marks a reunion of sorts for stars Mammootty and Mohanlal, the grand old men of South Indian cinema. Critical eyes might, however, be drawn this way by the prospect of a South Indian response to the North's recent, thunderous Dhurandhar diptych. This, too, is a spy thriller, albeit one that starts in appropriately stealthy fashion before tailing away into maximalist silliness; if it's similarly paranoid, it's not about India's neighbours, but threats from within, specifically big tech. At the film's centre - much remarked upon, never seen - is Periscope, an item of spyware we learn has been slipped onto citizens' smartphones and laptops so as to monitor online interactions and crush dissent. Fahadh Faasil, with shady-ass stubble, is the erratic, Musky tech bro whose Shakti Corp has engineered the program; Rajiv Menon his father, a compromised Government minister who signed the surveillance into law. Over on the side of the angels, Revathi is the opposition leader who vows to expose this scandal and clear up the mess before expiring in mysterious circumstances; Mammootty plays Dr. Daniel James, the heavy-drinking analyst she entrusts to investigate. Obliged to flee India after his employer's death, pronounced a traitor to the national cause, Danny - as he's known - heads into exile in London, where he adopts the YouTube handle Vimathan (or "Dissident") and starts to uncover the various ways consumer items have been weaponised against their users. These early scenes lend Patriot an air of Slow Horses-ish shabbiness that should play well with British audiences, who'll get to enjoy watching this fabled leading man putting the bins out and driving past a Spar. You didn't get that with Dhurandhar.

Yet if the Dhurandhars were a weapon wielded with sporadic skill but most often blunt propagandistic force, Patriot proves a more conventional entertainment. Running just shy of three hours, it's basically a more expansive update of those US techno-thrillers (The Lawnmower Man, Disclosure, The Net, Hackers) that lit up multiplexes in the first days of Web 1.0. In the strongest, most propulsive stretches here, Narayanan succeeds in fusing the old and the new, or in using the tried-and-tested to push back against the aggressive novelties of Shakti Corp and their ilk. It's rather fun to watch the now-seventysomething Mammootty, with his air of a retired university professor, donning a baseball cap to go undercover at a YouTubers' weekend symposium; in a week in which we learnt Google has been eating up storage on everybody's devices by installing AI tech without prior consent, this plot does feel timely, and there's something very much on the money about the way the Palantir-like Shakti, who we learn started as an IT consultancy firm, has rapidly remodelled itself as a major tech player with plans to operate as a private security force. (It wouldn't surprise me if we saw a thick-eared Western variant of this particular plot, probably involving Liam Neeson, within the next one-to-three years.) For some part of its running time - roughly as long as it takes our hero to parse discarded devices for the data that will make a conclusive case against the enemy - Patriot's narrative coding presents as sound, and Narayanan backs it up with solid, involving analogue setpieces: the pulse does quicken around the intermission block, when a YouTuber's prank provides the opening act of a convoluted kidnap attempt in a crowded airport. 

Other elements, alas, just don't scan. Come the second half, we once more bear witness to the spectacle of a pensionable leading man overpowering goons half his age; Narayanan has to deploy a slice-and-dice strategy in the action scenes, frenetically cutting around so as to distract from the unignorable fact his star is neither as mobile nor as dynamic as he once was. Yet beyond this aging star issue, Patriot also has a Big Movie Problem. This is, at heart, a taut two-hour thriller that has been expanded to three to fit some dubious post-pandemic idea of a cinematic event (and thereby get everybody off their sofas and phones). Tightly controlled stretches move the plot on and ratchet up the tension, but there's also a growing level of filler and waffle that relegates the whole to mixed-bag status. The movie enshittifies itself; heading into its final half-hour, Patriot has started to feel almost as exhausting as dealing with actual technology in 2026. Within this ever more sprawling superstructure, the actors are mostly left to themselves, with - again - mixed results. Mohanlal capably shoulders a long stretch at the point Daniel goes AWOL from the plot, playing a one-legged Signal Corps veteran who reconnects with our hero via streetlight Morse code (fuck you, Elon) and conceals a blade in his crutch; and Zarin Shihab is quietly forceful under a headscarf as Daniel's relentless partner Ayisha. Yet local luminary Nayanthara is stuck with a sorely underdetermined part as the hero's first wife and occasional helpmate, and though Faasil - the stealth genius of recent South cinema - brings his usual wiry intensity to the Shakti command centre, he also seems wildly overqualified for such a stock Lex Luthor role. It's still hard not to thrill when the second half pulls a narrative judo move, turning Periscope against those who engineered it - like I said, there is good stuff in here - but Narayanan also wants us to swallow down a lot of generic thriller nonsense between fat handfuls of popcorn. A bit of a tin foil hat movie, all told - and I sensed the hat being worn so as to keep the battiness and bad ideas in.

Patriot is now screening in selected cinemas.