The first half of Sardar 2 may seem familiar, but at least it commits to the kind of spy thriller it wants to be. There’s a lofty idea in there about a Japanese-made bioweapon that’s being kept secret by the Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and there’s a thrilling flashback that gives you the origins of how this weapon got to India in the first place. Set predominantly in the 1980s, the film sees Bose (Karthi), or Sardar, navigating the complexities of this international mission, and we also get a series of Mission: Impossible-style action set pieces that cover everything from the back of an airplane to the front of a Japanese bullet train.
Unlike PS Mithran’s earlier films, which worked best as entertainingly told message movies, there’s a sincere effort that’s gone into developing Bose’s character into a genuinely complex human being. The film makes the case for this early on when the bad guys threaten a RAW agent by taking his daughter hostage. But the threat here is not that they would kill the little girl if her father refuses to divulge sensitive information. Instead, they claim they will use the girl as a detonator to set off a mass shooting that would affect her mental health later on.
At first, this threat seems far-fetched, but it takes us a little over an hour to understand how neatly it fits in with the film’s theme of guilt. Just as this RAW agent understands the guilt and trauma that come with killing innocents, you see how he’d rather have his daughter killed than live with the weight he’s been carrying all along. This aspect is then developed to fit into Bose’s story as well. Having survived many missions, he too continues to live with the guilt that resulted from an error of judgment that caused the death of an entire village, even if he helped save the lives of three crore people. And just as the aforementioned RAW agent figures his way out to redeem himself from his past ghosts, you see Bose trying to escape his past too. If Sardar was the redemption arc of a person who was termed a traitor, Sardar 2 is the redemption arc of a man who believes he’s a terrible person and a bad father.
It’s this aspect of guilt that adds a potent layer to the pairing of Faiza (Ashika Ranganath) with Viji (Karthi), not just because they both have to prove themselves, but also because they are both children of RAW agents who failed in their missions. This makes the film ripe for masala moments, but it also makes the case for how generational trauma works. Through Faiza, we see a daughter coming to terms with who her mother was. And through the dynamics shared by Viji and Bose, we see a father finally trying to make amends to his son.
These are interesting aspects that add an element of interiority to an otherwise plainly told thriller. As the film moves on from these intimate dynamics to settle for a story about an imminent apocalypse, it devolves into utterly generic territory. This is where the characters devolve too, becoming uni-dimensional dispensers of information. From lines brimming with life, the dialogue suddenly becomes a giant dump of exposition. And from people telling you their stories, the storytelling becomes so plain that you feel like you’re reading conspiracy theories on the dark web.
A giant thirty-minute stretch in the film’s second half is taken up by a mission that involves finding the secret bioweapon. On paper, not only should we have felt the urgency that comes from a tight timeline, we should also have the thrills of a treasure hunt. But finally, the secret is uncovered so easily that you feel like the leads just walked into a room accidentally and discover it. And for a film that talks about the endless commitment of an Indian spy, it needed to have written the RAW agents of today (a team led by Ashish Vidyarthi’s character) with slightly more intelligence.
And yet, none of these aspects chip away at the true promise of this film as much as the presence of mega villain Yogi, played by SJ Suryah. Not only have we seen him play the eccentric villain dozens of times by now, but the film gives him nothing new to work with. His backstory makes no difference to us, nor does his evil plan for the future. His wild laughter doesn’t add to the chills, nor does his monologue about medicines and how the human race is slowly dying. You can see the same effort in the way Karthi tries a tad too hard to differentiate Viji from Bose. This effort makes it easy to ‘catch’ Karthi acting, especially when he plays Bose.
This crash in the second half makes Sardar 2 feel like someone stapled together action set pieces with Wikipedia pages about antibiotics and modern medicine. The ending feels entirely incomplete, and the emotional depth of a character we’ve known from an earlier film adds nothing to what we feel about him now. Or maybe there’s some cleverness after all to making a film about modern medicine and intentionally making it this generic.