Veera Dheera Sooran – Part 2 Movie Review: SU Arun Kumar’s Veera Dheera Sooran begins in a most intriguing manner. The filmmaker drops us in the middle of a developing situation with hardly any setup to give us an idea of why things are happening. This instantly makes us get involved with the film — even though we hardly know anything about its plot or character.

A woman lands up at the door of Periyavar/Ravi (Prudhvi Raj, cast against type in a serious role), a local big shot with criminal links, of doing away with her husband. Her husband, meanwhile, complains to SP Arunagiri (SJ Suryah, fine balancing the greyness of the character to keep us guessing) that his wife and daughter are missing. This provides the cop with the ammo that he’s been looking for to take down Periyavar and his son Kannan (Suraj Venjaramoodu, making an impressive debut in Tamil), who had played dirty with him a decade ago. Arunagiri plots an encounter killing prompting Periyavar to reach out to his erstwhile viswasi Kaali (a robust Vikram who offers a peek into the mass avatar of his Dhool and Saamy days), who has given up his violent ways and is now leading a peaceful life with his wife Kalai (a competent Dushara Vijayan even makes us overlook the huge age gap between her and the male lead) and their two children.

Arun Kumar keeps the tension alive by making Kaali vulnerable as he pits him against three individuals who he cannot trust and yet do their bidding as they slyly use his family as a threat in their own ways. At least until the intermission, the director holds back from giving us any peek into their shared history. All we get are mere mentions of events and names from their past — especially an incident that they refer to as ‘Sudhakar sambavam’ — which has led them all to this powder keg of a situation. This actually forces us, the audience, to individually imagine what might have happened, and pick characters to root for as well as hate.

And tense action keeps unfolding as there are cat-and-mouse-game-like scenarios and near-miss episodes that keep us hooked. One particular scene, involving landmines (or “kezhangu”, as the characters call it) delivers edge-of-the-seat thrill, and another, which marks the meeting of Kaali and Arunagiri gives us a whistle-worthy mass masala moment.

The film would have remained unique and engaging (and also justifying the Part 2 in the title) if Arun Kumar had trusted his audience and chosen to show us only the events that unfold during this one night. Perhaps he felt breaking the convention of providing a flashback would be too risky a move, but the director decides to give us the back story (at least the portions that matter), including the ‘Sudhakar sambavam’. This is where the film begins to lose its individuality as the back story that we eventually get doesn’t match with what we have all built up in our heads all through the first half; rather, it just feels so routine!

The film does recover from this minor setback when it gets back to the present with an ambitious one-shot set piece (shot with dynamism by Theni Eswar, whose night-time cinematography is one of the film’s strong points) that begins with a group of characters discussing who among them could be the black sheep and moves on to a shootout between cops and gangsters, and then to a heroic moment.

But then, just when we expect it to soar higher, it helplessly remains stuck on the ground. Like someone painstakingly building a house of cards and finally making a move that brings most of the structure down, Arun Kumar undoes all the earlier good work with a weakly written third act (despite its title, this is not the film where we can willingly suspend disbelief when its hero gets back up after being thrashed and even shot at by over a dozen men) that leaves us with a slightly bitter aftertaste. And the director himself seems to have realised this and decides to bank on nostalgia (yes, with THAT Vikram song!) to inject some energy into his limp climax.