Perhaps the idea was for Indian 2 to skip all personal angles and jump straight into becoming a ‘social’ film. Where then is the deep socio psychological commentary on our society and its people? From out of nowhere, Senapathy comes up with the brainwave of inspiring people to rat on their near and dear ones—and it’s an idea that could well have been the theme of this whole film. Senapathy thinks country first, but what’s a country if not its very-many units of people? For him, mind and heart are the same, but what of the likes of Chitra Aravindhan (an invested Siddharth)? How do you get them to look past their families? The portion that touches upon this late into the second half is the film’s best—and notably, Senapathy isn’t part of it for the most part. This got me wondering if Senapathy was even needed for this film. Were the gimmicky kills needed? Would it not have been sufficient to have the influence of Indian affect this film and its characters? But perhaps that’s a different film entirely. Shankar’s Indian deserved a sequel that was ready to sink into nuances, but Indian 2 doesn’t even address the fundamental question of whether a black-or-white extremist can understand/inspire the greyness of his country’s people.

Even the manner of Senapathy’s executions in this film is laughably childish. In the first film, you got the haunting image of a killed man, whose mouth fills up with rice spilling from a sack (a nod to a previous Manorama line). Here, one victim trots like a horse on the road. Another becomes feminine and director Shankar has him acting all coy and shy and covering his chest (like women are expected to do, apparently)—and all of this is supposed to make us laugh. Yet another leaks bodily fluids through his mouth, which Senapathy guides with his finger in zero gravity to form warning text. It’s like Senapathy, during his Taipei vacation, saw Anniyan, and decided that he could get gimmickier with his kills—and worse, that he could enjoy them too.

Bobby Simha, playing Pramod (son of Inspector Krishnaswamy from the first film), is restricted to looking rather irritated from start to finish. He’s a crafty cop who can’t hold his gun tight. If this were a film interested in anyone’s emotions, it would focus on telling us why for Pramod, catching Senapathy is a ‘life ambition’. Instead, we get a 100-something man racing along on a unicycle for what seems like eternity, before getting off and showing off his musculature to a group of topless, gym-going men. It seems Senapathy, during his vacation in Taipei, caught a screening of Shankar’s I as well.

The director’s films aren’t exactly remembered for well-informed politics, considering they aim to offer populist catharsis. But you still don’t expect a dig at government freebies. I suppose nuances of social equality are a tall ask for a film whose protagonist’s important dialogue comes with fundamental lip-sync issues. You know a film is not working when even the late Vivekh struggles to get going with his one-liners. The man, known for dropping nuggets of knowledge in his humour, uses light-year as a unit of time (when it’s a unit of distance)—but as I said, nothing really works in Indian 2.

You know how sometimes a sequel is called a ‘spiritual sequel’? Indian 2 can be called a deeply dispiriting sequel, I think; it’s a film that shows almost no understanding of the soul and strength of the first film and its protagonist. For these reasons, it’s really hard not to join the chorus of citizens in this film as they fling objects at the protagonist and yell, “Go back Indian!”