'Coolie' Movie Review: Lokesh Imitates Lokesh In A Convoluted 'Baashha' Reprise

Lokesh Kanagaraj is no longer a “young” filmmaker. He’s been around for eight years and six films, and it’s become easy to predict the exact manner in which he works on his screenplays. Back when he introduced the Gatling gun towards the end of the much-loved Kaithi, we didn’t just get one of Tamil cinema’s most exhilarating climaxes, we also got a textbook example of what one can do with a great Chekhov’s Gun.

Five films and an artillery later, you’re able to make out the beats of what he’s trying to achieve, hours before his films get there. So when we saw a happy picture of Parthiban/Leo and family feeding their newly domesticated hyena, you could sense that the wild animal would make a return later on in the film. And by the time we hit Coolie, our minds are working overtime when a pointless character walks past a closed door with another pointless character revealing how lethal the inmate of that room is. It may have been a gun in Kaithi, a canon in Vikram, a box and arrow in Master and the Hyena in Leo, but with Coolie, Lokesh has possibly realised that he’s making a film so big that he can now afford to cast a full-time superstar from another industry as his Chekhov’s Gun. 

Shruti Haasan, Rajinikanth and Soubin Shahir in 'Coolie'

The same can be said about another tired Lokeshism. Up until Leo, there was still excitement around the idea of the director bringing back an old ’90s song for a grand action sequence and the way it instantly reintroduced a cheeky number to Gen Alpha. But by the time we get to that point in Coolie, it’s no longer fun or cool. It feels more like the awkward attempt of a director trying to mimic himself after he has bought into his legend. 

Now that’s a strange feeling to experience when you’re witnessing a film starring a star as massive as Rajinikanth. In the films Lokesh made with Vijay, you could always sense a compromise of a film that was neither fully Lokesh’s nor Vijay’s. But with Coolie, the result is quite the opposite. Not only does it try hard to be another Rajinikanth film, it’s also trying desperately to be another Lokesh film as well. 

Rajinikanth in a still from 'Coolie'

So when Lokesh isn’t imitating himself, he’s regurgitating every single trick from the Superstar playbook. This includes the towering shadow of the Baashha formula, with us always having to second-guess the origins of Rajini’s “real” character after he chooses a life of sobriety. And what's just as odd for a Lokesh film is that Rajini’s Deva comes more alive in the lighter, funnier portions than he does in the action blocks crafted around his swagger.

Lokesh used to be able to organically create whistle-worthy moments without ever compromising on plot, but with Coolie he pads up a tired plot with so many twists, sub-plots and characters that you feel stuck in a convoluted web of lies in which everything stops making sense. You can sense the film deviating far away from the core plot to the point that the intention shifts to just deliver one big shocking moment every 20 minutes or so. It’s something you expect and accept when Atlee does it, but when Lokesh does it, you can sense a lack of confidence. 

This one twist after another format gets too tiring too quickly, and you’re reminded of the structure of a ’90s Abbas-Mustan movie. There is no real way to make a narrative sense of the film after we’ve bought into that conceit, and we’re just trying to scratch our heads from one complicated conflict after another. 

So we can't call it anything but convenient writing when Deva, the orphan, is being forced into a family sentiment. Just as difficult to buy is the depth of Deva’s friendship with an old buddy when we see so little about what brought them closer. And why exactly is Shruti Haasan’s Preeti so angry with Deva, and why are we never really told why? 

But from this point, you’re able to sense how strongly Lokesh wanted to repurpose the barebones structure of his film Vikram, too. Like Kamal Haasan’s gang of retired Black Ops squad, we realise how Rajinikanth's Deva too belongs to a violent gang of subdued coolies with a past of their own. The beats appear to be far too similar to those of Vikram, and in the service of the superstar, we get a film that's always trying too hard without attempting anything new. 

Rajinikanth in a still from 'Coolie'

We get the clever game they’re trying to play with a bottle of Mansion House, and we get the many ways in which we’re fed with glimpses of the '80s Rajinikanth. In contrast, we feel exhausted by the way this film uses cameos, just for shock value, without them adding to the core plot or our understanding of Deva's personality. Ironically, for a film titled Coolie, we do not just see a director struggling under the weight of his film’s superstar; he also looks just as burdened by the weight of his fan following.