'Leader' Movie Review: Cringe Benefits Of A Self-Serious Spy Thriller

Of all the years of film-viewing, I never imagined I’d require visual descriptions (VD) to understand what an actor is trying to convey. RS Senthilkumar’s Leader, starring ‘Legend’ Saravanan, is best watched when the bottom half of your screen presents you with descriptions that tell you things as obvious as “he notices car”, “opens the door”, “closes the door”, “looks emotionally” and many more. One can argue that these were added for the benefit of those with hearing impairments to underscore imagery, but when the lead actor is Legend Saravanan, these descriptions become a crutch to help you understand the hidden meanings behind his expressions.

This is most obvious in what was designed be the film’s first “mass” hero scene. An assassin has been sent to tail Sakthivel (Legend Saravanan) and his daughter Irene (Iyal) and a smuggler has given the assassin a day to kill both of them. As Sakthivel walks around his workplace, his boss asks him why he isn’t worried about the man who is out to kill him. Sakthivel smirks (or does something resembling a smirk) and takes his boss to the boot of his car. As the boot swings open, we hear a phone ringing, and then we see the corpse of the assassin Sakthivel has managed to massacre. As we wait for Sakthivel to explain how that body ended up there, the camera is slowly pulled back and Ghibran’s background score begins to beam from all the speakers. Just when you feel like you’ve missed a detail, Sakthivel walks away in slow-mo and we cut to his boss’ shocked reaction. In hindsight, the aforementioned ‘smirk’ is supposed to be our cue to start whistling for this mass action hero, but the expression is so inscrutable that it takes every filmmaking department to tell you what to do and to inform you that you’re witnessing a transformation scene.

This isn’t to say that the film’s director RS Senthilkumar isn’t quite the specialist when it comes to taking a regular lead actor into the stratosphere of a superstar. Two of his previous films, Ethir Neechal and Kaaki Sattai, played vital roles in balancing Sivakarthikeyan’s comedic image of the time as he took strides towards becoming a bigger star. His Dhanush film Kodi too is an important fixture in the way it remodelled the actor’s image as he was preparing to play older, more mature roles. Most importantly, RS Senthilkumar’s last film, Garudan, is a textbook in analysing how to prop up an actor like Soori and then catapult him into the top league. In a sense, to get him to direct and write a film like Leader for the one-film-old Legend Saravanan can be looked at as a strategic masterstroke.

But good films are seldom the result of strategy, as they depend as much on intelligently made emotional decisions. With Leader, the film is so self-serious that it doesn’t even try to get us on its side. So when the film switches from the story of a doting car mechanic named Sakthivel to his backstory in which he’s a part of a seven-member squad that resembles the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) from the Mission Impossible series, we’re not quite sure if the joke is on us. But as the film cuts for an interval with the screen turning red with the words “Into A Mission” replacing “Intermission”, there’s not much else to do but succumb to the silliness.

The following one hour is some of the most fun you will have in the theatres this year. The writer in RS Senthilkumar feels that his first half has already done enough to make us care for Sakthivel, and that he can just about go anywhere with his backstory. So, he takes the character and puts him in on a covert operation to free trapped Indian students who are stuck in a fictional country called… Elargia. This country looks like Eastern Europe, and the people sound like Russians, but you know by then that the only point of this country is to 'Enlargia' the hero's image.

The absurdities only begin from there. The film sneaks in an evil twin angle for the villain and it also invents a psychological trauma for Sakthivel that makes him think all young girls look like his daughter. And when the film takes another bold step to convince us that this daughter suffers from a condition called textrachondria, in which her heart is oddly placed on the left side of her body, Leader has simultaneously achieved cult status, even before the first show is over. The pulpy fun that follows is so ridiculously unhinged that we find it completely normal, even when we’re taken to an orphanage that is celebrating something of a special day. What is this day? Father's Day, nonetheless.

Such gems are everywhere, including a picture of Tom Cruise, whom Irene believes is her father. In a lesser film, we may be tempted to read this as a hat tip to the Mission Impossible series, but given the setting, you can also assume her confusion given how the film’s hero is also a spitting image of Cruise. Add to this an Old Boy-styled fight scene on the Vande Bharat train and a climactic twist even Hitchcock would be proud of, you leave the theatre feeling like you lost a little piece of yourself in Elargia.