From the archive: "Jailer"

Jailer finds the venerable Tamil superstar Rajinikanth embracing his Liam Neeson period in playing Pandian, a "dinosaur" retiree whose efforts to make YouTube videos with a precocious grandson are interrupted by news the kid's father, an upstanding police officer, has gone missing while on assignment. As Pandian ventures back into an underworld he once ruled over as a no-nonsense prison warden - and starts beating seven bells out of a network smuggling religious idols - we are once more reminded of this leading man's ability to organise not just an entire film, but whole scenes around himself; he's the real idol being showcased and worshipped here. Now 72, Rajinikanth remains nothing much to look at, with his (stick-on) Noel Edmonds beard and chunky NHS specs. But that may just be his secret weapon: he is at heart a character actor who broke through in an industry just small enough for a character actor with real screen smarts to make it big, a man who appears in complete control of almost every situation into which he steps. (Jailer's first half is dependent on Pandian charming both a taxi driver and a psychiatrist into doing his bidding and covering his tracks.) Such overbearing gravitational pull poses a slight problem for the movie - or would pose a problem if it had been conceived as anything more substantial than fan art. From the moment Pandian reveals he's overpowered the (much younger) thugs who've bundled him into the back of his car, we're left in no doubt that this man will come through and save the day. As star vehicles go, it's altogether plain sailing; safe to say Rajinikanth isn't unduly exerted in the execution of these tasks, and you might argue he's worked long and hard enough not to have to put his back into these projects any more.

He's gained a useful ally, however, in the young writer-director Nelson, who allows for no such thing as an entirely uninteresting shot. Faced with a movie star who just wants to play the movie star, Nelson does his most imaginative work here around Pandian's nemeses, principally their cackling chief Varman (Vinayakan, giving exactly what you want for this role), whose chosen method of flushing out rats in his organisation involves suspending them over vats of acid and interrogating them before a hooting audience of ne'er-do-wells. (These sequences have the air of a nefarious game show: Squeal or No Squeal.) Whether filming these villains breaking into a communal dance after phoning in a threat or staging - hands down, heads off - the decapitation of the year, Nelson has taken it upon himself to disrupt the inevitability of this outcome wherever possible, or at least to make it a fun ride for the most part, each shot a wink to his intended audience. You and I both know where this is going, he's saying, but that doesn't mean we can't get up to some middling-to-expert mischief along the way. It's the wonky smirk Rajnikanth breaks into once he knows he has the drop on a foe; it's the wacko pre-intermission scene that encourages us to cheer even louder for our hero as he grandly announces his plan to lapse into outright sociopathy for the duration of the second half. (So grab yourself a Kia-Ora and be back in your seats in ten.) The movie gets away with it only because that second half is so deranged that even attempting to synopsise its contents could well see you sectioned: all I can recall, from this distance, is that to steal the artefact he needs to get his son back, Pandian has to navigate a truly bizarre love triangle involving a preening, bewigged film star, his patsy proxy and the former's leading lady. From Taken, in other words, the movie bounds into Elmore Leonard territory, the only rationale being that the film business is the one milieu more cutthroat than organised crime. (The Internet has its theories on who these new characters represent, and whether this is one superstar taking a swipe at another.) Too haphazard to qualify as first-rank Rajnikanth, it often seems as though the star is the only organising principle in play here, surrounded as he is by wild spitballs and flagrant non-sequiturs. Yet it's nevertheless one of the livelier examples of dadsploitation fired our way of late. In the unlikely event his algorithm led him here, Liam Neeson would probably kill for some of this energy and verve.

(November 2023)

Jailer is now streaming via Prime Video; a sequel, Jailer 2, is now showing in cinemas nationwide and shall be reviewed here in the coming days.