'Mahaan' Movie Review: Vikram's Film Is Messy and Doesn't Rise Above Its Ideas

Karthik Subbaraj’s Mahaan doesn’t begin on a promising note. An injured Gandhi (Vikram) walks out of his 90s era car in 2016 and sets it aflame. It quickly teleports us to a monochrome 1968 where Gandhi, the son of a freedom fighter and, well, Gandhian, is shown to be adept in the game of cards with a friend whose father brews country liquor for a living. Only some of these details are shown, a lot of it is narrated in words, ‘we were freedom fighters’, ‘we saw Gandhi from afar’, ‘we will never consume liquor', ‘we will fight for prohibition’. The exposition and ideological gauntlet begin to grate almost instantaneously. It’s all very unlike Karthik Subbaraj. Thankfully the film only improves from here, but the bad news is that its ceiling is not all that high.

After those initial portions, Mahaan jumps to 1996 to a conformist adult Gandhi, married, a father and a schoolteacher. We get hints that there’s a resting gangster side somewhere deep inside him but for close to about forty years that gangster has only shown up during a game of cards or inside Pilot theatre. Or in his dreams. Vikram’s Gandhi transforms into the ‘The Man with No Name’ in his sleep, belting out “get three coffins ready” like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. But after a chance meeting with a beggar on his fortieth birthday and a harsh dressing down, and a day for himself without family, he takes matters into his own hands. A curious choice from Karthik on the beggar as a major plot shifter, almost like the witches in Macbeth or the ghost in Hamlet. Mahaan doesn’t shy away from its larger Shakespearean themes.

Mahaan for all its drunken stupor, is about family—organic and those ill-conceived and the warring within both. Gandhi meets his childhood buddies in his mid-life and eschews his family and their ideology to take to drinking both as a pastime and as business. It’s a man making up for lost time and opportunities, someone breaking out of a cage made from an ideology full of holes. “In art one must kill one’s own father”, said Picasso. Gandhi decides to kill his father’s shadow and that of his wife and son. Patricide is built into this work. We get an unapologetic stretch from Vikram and Karthik Subbaraj as Gandhi, Sathyavaan (Bobby Simha) and Sathyavan’s son Rocky (Sananth) rise in their alcohol business tackling everything from wine shop syndicates to government distribution of alcohol (real life TASMAC becomes the fictional SAMRAT in Mahaan, one of the film’s cleverer wordplays). But there is no real conflict here. Maybe that’s why the repeated references to Annamalai, in which Rajinikanth goes from penury to industrialist in the space of a song.

Characters, true to their vocation, are perennially inebriated in this film. But the filmmaking is alarmingly sober and so are the colours. No place for the kind of flashiness or the exuberant dash of hues Karthik tried in Jagame Thandhiram. Mahaan is much more muted, almost colourless in some portions lacking any contrast. It gives the film a dull texture and there’s only so much cinematographer Shreyaas Krishna can do. An earlier fight scene has a wonderful single take, another action sequence in a dingy basement—with broken mannequins and reams of cloth—as trains pass by at regular intervals, each upping the tension, makes for a cracker of a scene between Gandhi and Dada—short for Dadabhai Naoroji, don’t ask—played by Dhruv Vikram. The shortened dada for the upright cop out to eradicate Gandhi the alcohol baron is another play on uneven ideologies. As the staunch Gandhian who has never wavered from the path, how come Dada (Dhruv is predictably given Vikram line throwbacks—one to I and another to Saamy, no surprise that the latter works better) is now out for an eye? In his defence, Karthik Subbaraj does pose this question to his characters, but the filmmaker didn’t think through his own messy concoction. What may have sounded legible or even intelligent on paper didn’t crossover to the screen.

If there is one heartening fact about Mahaan it is that Vikram’s still got it. Give the man a role devoid of makeovers he’s still capable of imparting every limb to it. Very few actors have or use the physicality the way Vikram does. When he is on screen his face, hands, legs and body all speak in unison. It made me wonder how good Vikram would have been in a film like Master. He would have sailed effortlessly through the two emotional scenes in which Vijay’s struggle is laid bare (Lokesh Kanagaraj intelligently shoots through the sun and lets the lens flare take care of it in one). But both the writing and the filmmaking don’t rise above the ideas of Mahaan. There’s a good film within its great central conflict in there somewhere. Until Karthik Subbaraj finds it, give me glorious misfires like Jagame Thandhiram—films that have something to say and take punts while doing it—any day.

Our Rating: 2.5 Stars out of 5