‘Kanguva’ Review: A Shoddy Monument To Superstardom

Director: Siva
Writers: Siva, Adhi Narayana, Madhan Karky
Cast: Suriya, Bobby Deol, Disha Patani, Yogi Babu
Language: Hindi (dubbed)

Sometime last month, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York took the internet by storm. The prize was a modest 50 dollars. Some participants were more convincing than others, but the reason this event went viral is because the real Chalamet made a surprise visit in the end to greet the winners. Ironically, he looked nothing like the men trying to ape him. The point of this anecdote — wait for it — is that the entire Indian fantasy-period-action-epic bubble these days is an expensive look-alike contest. During the interval of Kanguva, I was momentarily disoriented: was the second half of Devara: Part 1 or Kalki 2898 AD going to start playing? Would anyone even notice? These movies resemble each other in strange and amateur ways, but none of them resemble the original star, S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali. In fact, like Chalamet himself, Rajamouli showed up in a cameo in one of these films — and that scene alone became more popular than the mega-budget production surrounding it.

The elements, world-building and lore of the participants in this genre are indistinguishable: bounty hunters, two narratives centuries apart, legendary warriors, superstar double roles, five tribal islands, spirited kids, invisible heroines, black forests, white forests, famished sharks and unfortunate crocodiles. If you think my contest analogy is flimsy, wait till you see how loosely connected the two timelines in Kanguva are. The painfully familiar film unfolds as history repeating itself 1000 years apart. In 2024, a Goan bounty hunter named Francis (Suriya) overcomes video-game graphics and childish humour to cross paths with a boy who’s escaped a random brain-experiment facility. The boy bristles with lab-made superpowers and past-life trauma: Francis feels an old connection and decides to protect the kid from Goan gangsters and Russian thugs. This absolutely dispensable portion is forgotten once the film flashes back to 1070 AD. A fabled warrior named Kanguva (Suriya) leads a Game of Thrones-lite setting, adopts the son of an executed traitor, and sets out to protect his village Perumachi from Romanian conquerors and an animalistic baddie (Bobby Deol). The final act cuts back and forth between Goa and the ancient islands — between carnage and reincarnated carnage — desperate to establish how Kanguva’s paternal love for the boy survived lifetimes. The history-meets-future trope is not new, but Kanguva could’ve easily been called Love Aaj Kal too.

Suriya does what he can, but Kanguva has too many problems to be his film. It’s easy to blame the derivative writing. I could go on and on about the weak characterisation across both eras, the lack of emotional and logical reasoning behind an otherwise-brutal Kanguva’s affection for the boy, the token caste subtext, Bobby Deol’s unusually dialogue-heavy addition to the ‘Barbaric Bollywood Bobby’ canon (Animal, Love Hostel), and the film’s inherent reptile racism (the crocodiles are wrestled with and killed, but the snakes are allies?). But criticising the script — which is valid here — tends to absolve such lavishly mounted movies of their technical sins: a deafening soundscape, unimaginative staging, incoherent set pieces and blurry shot-taking. Ambition alone isn’t enough these days.

Kanguva is almost an anti-spectacle. It’s a rare actioner in which the action is its biggest eyesore. It’s a frenetic kind of ugly, where shots and visuals are stitched together without any aesthetic consequences. At most points, it’s hard to tell people from objects, fog from transitions, motion from environments, cameos from supporting roles, and music from dialogue. At most, the sky goes orange and sepia-tinted on the villain’s island. There’s not a single striking moment, despite a whole lot of severed heads and hands, torn bodies, choppy seas, screechy humans and emotive eagles. A subgenre of Ambient Television, this is Ambient Action — where the viewer can switch off, check their phones, day-dream a little, wonder about their next meal, and mentally return to the violence on screen without missing much of note. Every time my attention veered away, I worriedly snapped out of it only to be soothed by the kinetic mediocrity of the noise on screen.

The scale is supposed to be the meat of a film, yet Kanguva makes the ‘action aaj kal’ look like a filler — the sort of part that allows the film to bide time and build up to something substantial. But then again, even the Goan comic nonsense, the songs, the animals, the baddies, the goodies and the female characters are fillers. So the substance never comes. The waiting never ends. The formula is just fundamentally undone. Kanguva is perhaps the weakest and most forgettable of the copycat generation. It’s the right time to add that the Timothée Chalamet event has sparked a series of global celebrity look-alike contests. It’s also the right time to add that another reason the clips went viral is because one of the ‘fake Chalamets’ was arrested that day. Make of that what you will.