First-time director Paul George’s Kattalan is what one may call a graphic novel movie. Almost all of its dialogues can be fit into two sides of an A4-sized page, and the effort that’s gone into it is only to re-create a storyboard that was made as a part of the film’s “writing”. As a film that follows the hyper-violent Marco in the same cinematic universe, Kattalan is a film that feels like it was forced to be made into a pan-Indian title. Apart from a handful of leads, almost the entire supporting cast is imported from all the other film industries of the country. Dialogues switch between Malayalam, broken Malayalam, Tamil, and English, and none of them delivers the impact it is meant to. And when they are not conveying plot points or exposition, Kattalan becomes home to some of the most pompous punchlines in all of our cinema.
Take the case of a line that must have felt like a big deal for its writers. The placement of this dialogue too is such that you suspect that a Muslim character was written in to the film only for this line to make sense; when a bloodthirsty Anthony (Antony Varghese) looks at his victim and mouths, “killing him may be haram to you, but it’s halal for me,” they must have expected a roar in theatres, but all I could hear were giggles. The same can be said about how the film overestimates its own coolness. In one scene, a gang of cartel members gather around an oval-shaped table, and the corpse of an enemy is slowly hoisted from a human-shaped hole that was made at its centre. The effect we needed to feel was the gruesomeness of this cartel, but what we feel is a particularly specific craving for barbecue chicken.
To be fair, none of this is out of bounds in a film that hails from the Marco cinematic universe, but there’s a point at which the self-seriousness of it all becomes ironic. It’s like the conviction that overpowered the silliness in Marco, somehow feels too sober in Kattalan. Antony Varghese, playing the mass action hero in the film, feels oddly out of place in scenes that are placed either before or after a big action sequence. So when it’s time for him to deliver his big punchline, spouting grandiose references from the Bible, he looks like he’s punching far beyond his weight.
What makes the film stick out even further is the lack of a coherent narrative thread. Apart from the film being written as a broad revenge saga between two rival gangs, there’s almost nothing resembling character development, motivations or a payoff. If one scene ends with a gang leader shouting at the top of his voice, demanding that he bring back the severed head of a rival, the next begins with another bad guy smoking a cigar, awaiting his cue to shout for his revenge.
And yet you’re able to hang on by a thread because the action scenes are reasonably well-choreographed, even when we rarely care about who is fighting whom. The scenes involving elephants feel legit, and there’s a fight scene set in a garage that works well as a cool intro scene for Antony. But even the violence isn’t violent enough in Kattalan to make you feel it in your gut like it did in Marco. As it aspires for 'Pan-India' reach, this is another aspect of the film that gets diluted, even when it plays with the ‘A’ rating. Ravi Basrur’s score isn’t as effective either, nor is the blood-splattering camerawork by Renadive. The post-credit cameo feels too meta to be taken seriously, and what we end up with is just another dumb action movie in which the punches simply don’t land.