‘Ekka’ Movie Review: Yuva Rajkumar’s Action-Drama Is Sustained by Some Fleeting Moments Of Freshness

It is a kind of kindness that sustains Yuva Rajkumar’s Muthu in Ekka. When he’s not signing blank papers to bail his friend out from a financial pinch, he’s helping strangers who get shot. While Muthu’s good heart has the notorious tendency to always get him into trouble, it is also the heart that leads him to his life’s purpose, warts and all. His mother, Rathna, describes him in succinct words: “There’s a child and animal inside you. Make sure the animal in you doesn’t eat the child.” While the words might paint quite a graphic picture, this is Muthu’s truth. And this also forms a very smart base for Rohit Padaki’s Ekka, which tries to pad up a generic action drama with an emotional core.

Ekka begins on a very familiar note. Muthu is exiled from his village by his mother, who is desperate for him to shed his naiveté. So he sets off to Bengaluru and drives cars in the hopes of paying for his blunder back in his hometown. Little does he know that the city not only unnerves him with its audacity, but also pokes him. And we all know what happens when you poke the bear. A gangster saga immediately follows, one which Muthu becomes an inadvertent part of. But the most interesting thing about Ekka is in its treatment. No matter how familiar its story might be, the path it takes keeps us engrossed. It takes the film almost the entirety of the first act to tell us Muthu’s place in the city’s chaos, something that not all films in this genre have the patience or tact for. 

A still from Yuva Rajkumar's 'Ekka'

Yuva Rajkumar’s Muthu instantly reminds us of a lighter version of another Muthu (Silambarasan TR’s character from Gautam Vasudev Menon’s Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu, 2022), whose big-city welcome is tainted with blood and guns. But instead of immediately indulging in his murky tendencies, the Muthu in Ekka marinates in his innocence a little bit. He creates a new life for himself — Pammi, a young girl with whom he strikes up an adorable friendship, and his girlfriend Nandini (Sanjana Anand) brighten his life. The film is also fortified by sharp observations — sometimes about the city itself (“Bengaluru is for everyone and at the same time it also belongs to no one,” says Muthu at one point) and also the characters in this world (“Don’t overdo your kindness. At the end of the day, it might strike you,” Muthu is told in another instance). 

Yuva Rajkumar in a still from 'Ekka'

Charan Raj’s music especially elevates portions of dilemma and resentment, emotions that Muthu is plagued by post-interval. While we all see the detour the film is going to take, miles away — the animal’s takeover of the child, so to speak — the second half misses the smart writing that powered its journey. The film does tie up a lot of the loose ends in the last act: an unlikely meeting with a traitor comes in the most unexpected setting, and new characters and their purposes are introduced. Atul Kulkarni plays Masthan, a bhai who reigns over Bengaluru. An upright police officer is assigned to clean up the city. Writers Padaki and Vikram Hathwar lend some depth to these characters, even if it’s through a novel personality trait or their just the presence they embody. We realise that Masthan and Muthu have much more in common than just their shared kindness, as we also note how Muthu and the cop are connected: both want to sleep peacefully in the night (one means this for himself, and the other wishes it for his city). 

But not every detail falls into place. Tamil-speaking villains, Garbage Ganga and Palani, add character to the film, but they unfortunately don’t go beyond being caricatures. Deaths aren’t treated with frivolity in Ekka, but this effect isn’t felt beyond dialogue in the film. The staging in the second half isn’t given enough time to flesh out Muthu’s “animal” arc (and the same goes for Rajkumar's transformation), and the film trods the path taken by many other action films of its kind. The convention ultimately trumps invention, but Ekka still offers glimpses of freshness, despite how fleeting they are.