It’s been a very long time since Suriya scored a unanimous theatrical hit. Soorarai Pottru and Jai Bhim were good films and received very good appreciation, but both skipped theatrical release and were released directly on Prime Video. Interestingly, the director, R. J. Balaji’s directorial debut, Mookuthi Amman, was also released directly on OTT. At a time when both of them need a theatrical hit, the hero and the director duo, teamed up for, Karuppu (Veerabhadrudu in Telugu ) a fantasy action drama film. The addition of Trisha, as female lead and Sai Abhyankkar, as music director, helped the film to generate good hype among fans and audience. After resolving the last-minute financial hurdles, the makers released the film today (i.e. a day later than the scheduled date). Did Suriya finally score a hit at the box office? Did R. J. Balaji utilise the opportunity to direct a star hero and deliver an engaging film? Did Sai Abhyankkar come up with chartbuster music yet again after, Dude? Let’s figure it out with a detailed analysis.

What is it about?

Baby Kannan(R. J. Balaji), a cunning and corrupt lawyer, runs a mafia and controls the Metropolitan Magistrate court in Chennai. He and his team intentionally extend the court hearings, to get fees from clients for a long time. They even turn judgments in their favour by bribing the Magistrate. What happens when a father(Indrans) and his daughter(Anagha Maaya Ravi), travel to Chennai from Kerala, with a bag full of gold? Why did the father carry a lot of gold in his bag? How did the deity(Suriya), Karuppuswamy, help the father and daughter, when they lost their gold? What challenges did the deity face while dealing with corrupt public officials? Forms the rest of the story.

Performances:

It’s good to see Suriya in an out-and-out commercial film after a long time. It looked like he thoroughly enjoyed playing the role of Karuppuswamy in the film. His screen presence and performance were top-notch as always. Trisha Krishnan in the role of Preethi, an honest and young lawyer did a good job with her performance. And yes, the age is catching up with her and it was very evident on screen.

Indrans and Anagha Maaya Ravi, in the roles of a helpless father and daughter, did an excellent job with their performance throughout the first half. The scenes on them in the first half are one of the major positives of the film. R. J. Balaji in the role of a corrupt lawyer did a good job with his performance but it would have been better if they had gone for an actor who has enough experience in doing antagonist roles. Interestingly, he had more slow-motion shots in the film than the hero, Suriya.

Natty Subramaniam in the role of Magistrate did well too. Especially, his performance was very good during his sequence in the film. The film had many notable actors and bearing one or two, most of them delivered good performances.

Technicalities:

Sai Abhyankkar’s work as a music director is a huge letdown. He failed to come out with good songs and apart from a couple of BGMs, his background score for the film was very loud, especially in the second half. G. K. Vishnu’s cinematography is good as always. Particularly during the fantasy episodes, the colour palettes and the frames he used, deserve appreciation. R. Kalaivanan’s editing was very tight and engaging in the first half but he should have done a better job in the second half. Production values by, Dream Warrior Pictures, were adequate. Let’s discuss the writer and director, R. J. Balaji’s work in detail in the analysis section.

Positives:

1.⁠ ⁠First Half
2.⁠ ⁠Suriya’s Screen Presence

Negatives:

1.⁠ ⁠Second Half
2.⁠ ⁠Loud Background Score
3.⁠ ⁠Over The Top Action Sequences

Analysis:

The directors, Shankar Shanmugam and Atlee in Tamil and Koratala Siva in Telugu, are a few of the directors in India, who are known for making socially relevant commercial entertainers, engagingly and entertainingly. These three directors along with a few other directors, made many commercially viable social drama films with different backdrops in the past. Just like the aforementioned dire tie, the director, R. J. Balaji, chose a socially relevant storyline and blended it well with socio-fantasy, with ‘God Vs Corrupt Public Official’, as a conflict point. Sounds existing, isn’t it? It indeed is exciting and up until the end of the first half, everything seemed to be working very well.

The emotional drama in the first half is the major highlight of the film. Unfortunately, after finishing the first half on a very good note, the director and his writing team, lost the track completely in the name of fan service and commercial mass moments. Right from the word go in the second half, everything appeared too loud and over the top.

It takes a good thirty to forty minutes for the protagonist to appear on screen but we as the audience never miss the protagonist during this period because of the gripping emotional drama. Right from the very first sequence, the director pulls us into getting connected with the father and daughter duo, their struggle and helplessness.

The director deserves appreciation for making the audience feel the pain of the father and daughter and we eagerly wait for someone to come and help them. And, when the protagonist, finally enters the screen and takes charge of the proceedings to help the father and daughter, every sequence was appreciated with loud cheers by the audience. The emotional drama, the initial conversation between God & the corrupt lawyer, the subsequent courtroom drama and the pre-interval sequence, made the first half end on a good note and raised the expectations further in the second half.

Unfortunately, for some reason, the director decided to take a different route in the second half and relied completely on mass commercial moments. It is where the film completely lost track. After letting God win, although on a sad note, at the end of the first half, the director seemed to have run out of ideas to come up with gripping drama further. Is it really possible for a corrupt human being to win against a powerful God? No way, right? The antagonist character appeared so small and insignificant in front of a ferocious God. It appeared like the director too is aware of it and included the dialogue – ‘Is it really required to use the powers of so many Gods’, just to stop a small-time corrupt lawyer’. That’s exactly what we as the audience feel while watching the second half. Since there’s no story or ideas to drive the film further, the director filled the second half of the film with commercial high moments one after the other. But, most of them appeared over the top, including the forced appearance of Suriya in his crowd favourite, Durai Singham getup. Another drawback of the film is that R. J. Balaji, took the role he played in the film too seriously and ended up giving a lot of screen space to his character with unnecessary slow-motion shots, punch dialogues, etc. It would have been better had he concentrated on writing, particularly in the second half.

Overall, interesting backdrop, socially relevant storyline and engaging emotional drama, in the first half worked out well but the film lost its track in the second half with a not-so-engaging screenplay and over the top action sequences. However, Karuppu, is a much better film among Suriya’s theatrical releases in the recent past. You may give it a try watching but keep your expectations low, particularly in the second half.

Bottomline – ‘God’s Magic’ Worked Partially

Rating – 2.5/5

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“Iceman” has cometh — and then some.

After spending the better part of a year teasing his first solo album since 2023 — and his first, more importantly, since losing the epic rap battle that climaxed with Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” — Drake finally dropped “Iceman” late Thursday along with two other albums whose existence took much of the world by surprise: “Maid of Honour” and “Habibti.”

Together, the three LPs comprise 43 new songs from the Toronto-born rapper and singer who’s been searching for a path back to the pop-cultural perch he occupied for much of the 2010s. To assess his progress, The Times’ Mikael Wood and August Brown took a preliminary listen then exchanged some thoughts.

MIKAEL WOOD: Well, August, to paraphrase the most psychotic track from the Kendrick-and-Drake beef: Meet the many Grahams. Early signs suggested that “Iceman” would constitute a return to Drake’s tough-talking ways in the wake of his humiliating defeat, and indeed that’s largely what the album delivers over plush yet hard-hitting beats.

Yet with “Maid of Honour” and “Habibti,” the 39-year-old born Aubrey Graham is also showcasing his other dominant modes: globe-tripping dance-music hedonist (on the former) and callow-sensitive R&B lover boy (on the latter). Clearly, the sheer volume and breadth of music here is meant to serve as a kind of shock-and-awe campaign designed to jolt us back to a time when Drake seemed to rule over not just hip-hop but all of pop music. (Don’t forget that 2018’s “Scorpion” contained 25 tracks.)

What do you make of his super-sizing effort here? Does it speak of an overflow of creativity — or of an inability to edit? We should say that Drake’s guests on the albums include 21 Savage, Central Cee, Sexyy Red, Popcaan and Future, the last of whom appears on “Iceman” in a song called “Ran to Atlanta” — a clear callback to Kendrick’s line in “Not Like Us” where he accuses Drake of scurrying to the Southern rap capital any time he’s in need of some street cred.

I can see that song finding its legs on rap radio along with — hey, whaddya know? — “2 Hard 4 the Radio,” which feels like a classic Drake jam à la “In My Feelings” or “Nice for What.” I was also struck the first time through the albums by “Cheetah Print,” a frisky strip-club joint, and “Goose and the Juice,” which sounds like … MGMT? I don’t know, man.

AUGUST BROWN: Drake’s task at this juncture is interesting and unprecedented: How does a generational superstar come back from the most comprehensive “Ether”-ing in modern music history? To go from being the defining artist of the 2010s to fighting a scorched-earth war with your own label and hanging out with — ugh — Adin Ross on his livestream?

His low-stakes collaborative album with Partynextdoor last year suggested he might just lick his wounds and blow right past it. But this new music is neither a hard-bitten response to nor a rear-view departure from the worst years of his career. It’s a guy still figuring out his next moves and deciding to make all of them at once.

As you said, Mikael, the trap-smeared “Ran to Atlanta” shows he at least has a sense of humor about the whole debacle, reuniting with Future to do exactly what Kendrick accused him of. (Hey, the tactic works for a reason — because it sounds great.) “2 Hard 4 the Radio” is a truly funny song title for Drake and has a lively West Coast funk lean to boot. I agree that if there are any hits to be found amid this hook-light barrage of music, it’s those two, and maybe the album’s early single “What Did I Miss” — it’s gigantic and churning and triumphal enough to make the case that Drake is still impervious.

Yet the beef is still background radiation to the whole project, and there’s almost — almost — something sympathetic when he raps on “Make Them Pay” that “I need compliments ’cause lately it’s just falling-outs and disagreements / Industry is really evil / And I faced the way they paint me, but it hurts just like the Philly Eagles.” Drake is a rococo master of self-pity, but damned if he doesn’t have a real reason for it this time. (That said, after “Not Like Us,” I maybe wouldn’t use my comeback album cover to don a sparkly white glove and allude to music’s most infamous alleged child molester?)

Onto the rest: “Maid of Honour” calls back to his failed-but-intriguing experiment in deep house, 2022’s “Honestly, Nevermind,” but subs out that LP’s raver fog for squelchy Miami bass, footwork and ghettotech. He probably thinks this one is in the raunchy lineage of Dance Mania records, but it’s not nearly as committed to the bit. “Road Trips” and “Cheetah Print” have a fun Nina Sky bounce, and “Outside Tweaking” and “True Bestie” take cool hard-cut production turns. But if this is supposed to be his horny-devil dance-floor album, he’s still limply phoning it in about his woes with OnlyFans models. How did he get such a muted performance out of Sexyy Red, of all people? If someone sidled up to me at the club and whispered “So much ass you should be cremated,” as Drake does on “BBW,” I’d reach for my bear spray.

He does better on “Habibti,” which feels like it collects all the weird castoffs of this cycle but ends up being the most interesting to follow. “WNBA” evokes that woozy, widescreen kingmaker period of “Take Care” and “Views”; “White Bone” is restless and unstructured and bubbling with texture while the moody guitars on “Fortworth” feel like they’re calling from inside Bieber’s “Swag”-iverse. “Slap the City” clatters and coos with R&B falsetto and at least makes the blank nihilism of Drake’s dating life feel self-aware. This is the least intentional of this trio of gormless, spray-and-pray LPs but perhaps the most layered and ambitious.

MIKAEL WOOD: So what do we think this Temu haul of an album drop will do for Drake’s career? As you pointed out, August, “Iceman’s” cover unmistakably evokes Michael Jackson — an icon of success (and, uh, other stuff) whom Drake has repeatedly used as a benchmark to measure his own impact. Billboard reports that Jackson is the only artist ever to occupy the top three slots on its album chart simultaneously. Given the excitement about Drake on the internet Thursday night, it doesn’t seem impossible that he might equal that feat after a week of massive streaming activity (though gentle Noah Kahan, hilariously, might be the one who ends up thwarting him).

At moments over the last two years, Drake seems to have been projecting the idea that he’s past caring about playing the pop-hit game; you can look at his cringey manosphere dalliance as his attempt to go around the old gatekeepers and connect directly with a narrow (if deeply passionate) slice of his fanbase. But the whole point of Drake has always been hits: his ability to read the culture and to funnel what he finds into songs that become almost oppressively ubiquitous.

With only a few exceptions — “2 Hard 4 the Radio” really does feel inevitable — I’m not sure I hear that spirit in this stuff, either because Drake can’t access it anymore or because he doesn’t care to. Yet neither does he seem to be in his innovator’s bag, trying out things to lead pop somewhere new as he’s done so many times before.

Drake performs at State Farm Arena on Dec. 9, 2022, in Atlanta.

(Paul R. Giunta / Invision / AP)

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AUGUST BROWN: I would absolutely crack up if Noah Kahan denied him the Jackson-equivalent chart feat he is so transparently trying for with this triptych. Social media buzzed with word that both Spotify and Apple Music had widespread outages last night upon release. But I wouldn’t put it past him to be on some Chaotic Good-type skulduggery spreading the rumor that he is bigger than streaming’s infrastructure. (Already, the most striking line from “Make Them Cry” — “My dad got cancer right now, we battlin’ stages / Trust me when I say there’s plenty things that I’d rather be facin” — may have been exaggerated.)

This trio of LP’s will be a huge hit, no question. At a time when rap seems to have lost its place on the Hot 100, this will surely notch a few top spots and reaffirm that Drake has a huge, committed fanbase that will stick with him in perpetuity. Not to compare a Jewish artist to a once-notorious Hitler-admirer, but there are echoes of the Ye model here, in that villain-arc Drake is now siloed off from pop and hip-hop music — both the culture and industry — when he used to define it. He’s now more or less an A-list Twitch streamer with million-dollar beats.

With these LP’s he’s performing full-throttle fan service, but I can’t see anyone outside of the Aubrey-sphere remembering much about these records in a year’s time, whereas people will be singing “Luther” and taunting “Wop wop wop wop wop” until the sun explodes.

If Drake truly sees himself as this generation’s Michael Jackson, an artist and economy that’s simply too big to fail (and too capable and adaptable to ever be truly uninteresting), congrats, he proved it. But the main feeling I have waking up from a long night with these three albums is exhaustion. Where the surprise-released “GNX” was airtight, instantly repayable and quotable, this is just a melting monolith of Drake content.