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

Related

Brian Lindstrom, a filmmaker whose documentaries shined a light on society’s underdogs and inspired social change, has died. He was 65.

Lindstrom’s wife, author Cheryl Strayed, confirmed the news on Instagram Friday.

“Brian Lindstrom died this morning the way he lived — with gentleness and courage, grace and gratitude for his beautiful life,” she wrote. “Our children, Carver and Bobbi, and I held him as he took his last breath and we will hold him forever in our hearts. The only thing more immense than our sorrow that Progressive Supranuclear Palsy took our beloved Brian from us is the endless love we have for him.”

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, PSP is caused by damage to nerve cells in areas of the brain that control thinking and body movements. The rare neurological disease progresses rapidly.

Strayed, who penned the bestselling memoir “Wild,” which was later adapted for the big screen and starred Reese Witherspoon, announced just weeks ago that Lindstrom had been diagnosed “with a serious, fatal illness.”

Lindstrom was born Feb. 12, 1961. The son of a bartender and a liquor salesman, he was raised in Portland, Ore. — which he and his family still called home.

He was the first member of his family to attend college, which he paid for by taking out student loans, landing work-study jobs and working summers in a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska. During a 2013 TEDx Talk, Lindstrom said that after he’d exhausted all the video production classes at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, his professor Stuart Kaplan gave him a gift certificate to a class at the Northwest Film Center. There, Lindstrom made a short film about his grandpa that landed him a spot in the MFA program at Columbia University.

It was a train trip with his grandpa that inspired Lindstrom to tackle challenging topics with a lens that restored dignity to his subjects. His grandpa was a binge-drinker, and on day three of the trip, he woke up with a hangover and was missing his dentures. Lindstrom, only 5 at the time, noticed the way other passengers treated him and his grandpa differently.

“I think what my films are about is that search for my grandfather’s dentures, the humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between us and them and arrives at we,” he said.

Lindstrom said he returned to Portland after film school and “did several projects with the Northwest Film Center that had me putting a camera in the hands of kids on probation, homeless teens, newly recovering addicts, hard-hit people who had hard-hitting stories to share.”

“Those projects taught me so much about the transformative power of art, and they gave me permission I felt in my personal films to ask people if I might follow them, so that an audience could better understand what they were going through, and by extension, better understand themselves,” he said.

Lindstrom’s 2007 award-winning cinéma-vérité-style film, “Finding Normal,” followed long-term drug addicts as they left prison or detox and tried to rebuild their lives with the help of a recovery mentor.

“What I’m most proud about is that ‘Finding Normal’ is the only film to ever be shown to inmates in solitary confinement at Oregon State Penitentiary, and not, I might add, as a punishment,” Lindstrom said.

In 2013, he released “Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse,” a documentary that illuminated the life of a man who grappled with schizophrenia and examined his death, which happened in police custody. Discussing the film with LA Progressive in 2018, Lindstrom said that he doesn’t make films for audiences.

“I make them for the people in the film. It is my small way of honoring them,” he told the outlet. “That doesn’t mean I don’t delve into dark areas or that I ignore that person’s struggles. I’m much more concerned with trying to achieve an honest depiction of that person’s life than I am with any potential audience reaction.”

Lindstrom’s work aimed to inspire empathy and humanize those suffering in the margins of society, but it also catalyzed policy change. His acclaimed 2015 documentary, “Mothering Inside,” followed participants in the Family Preservation Project (FPP), an initiative helping incarnated moms establish and maintain bonds with their children.

Midway through filming the documentary, the Oregon Department of Corrections announced it planned to nix funding for the FPP. Lindstrom hosted early screenings of the film, which inspired grassroots advocacy that reached then-Gov. Kate Brown, who subsequently signed legislation that restored funding. The film’s release also helped make Oregon the first state in the U.S. to pass a bill of rights for children of incarcerated parents.

Partnering with Strayed, Lindstrom made the documentary short, “I Am Not Untouchable. I Just Have My Period,” for the New York Times in 2019. The film highlighted the experience of teen girls in Surkhet, Nepal, and the menstrual stigma they faced. Most recently, the filmmaker released, “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill,” which examined the folk-rock singer’s life from her traumatic childhood and drug-addled adolescence through her rise in the Laurel Canyon music scene and untimely death.

Lindstrom, discussing “Judee Sill” and his style as a filmmaker, told Oregon ArtsWatch, “It’s the chance to kind of focus on the question: What does it mean to be human? The person that the film is about, what can they teach us, what can we learn from them? What can they learn from themselves?”

In 2017, Lindstrom received the Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon for his work advancing civil rights and liberties. That same year, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Lewis & Clark College.

In Strayed’s post announcing Lindstrom’s death, she described their more than 30-year partnership as a stroke of “tremendous luck.”

“We loved each other and our kids with deep devotion and true delight. He was a stellar husband. He was the most magnificent dad. He was a man whose every word and deed was driven by kindness, compassion, and generosity,” she wrote. “He saw the goodness in everyone. He believed that we are all sacred and redeemable.

“His work as a documentary filmmaker was dedicated to telling stories of people who, as he put it, ‘society puts an X through.’ He erased that X with his camera and his astonishing heart.”

Strayed’s memoir — which followed her as she hiked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of her mother’s death, a battle with drug addiction and divorce from her first husband — concludes with a happy ending. She finished the months-long hike and sat on a white bench near the Bridge of the Gods, a stone’s throw from the spot where, she writes, she’d marry Lindstrom four years later.

“His greatest legacy is Carver and Bobbi, who embody everything good and true about their father. Their extraordinary grace, courage, and fortitude during this harrowing time was unfaltering and grounded in the undying love Brian poured into them every day of their lives,” she wrote. “We do not know how we will live without him. We’re utterly bereft. We can only walk this dark path and search for the beauty Brian knew was there. It will be his eternal light that guides us.”