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'Rifle Club' Movie Review: Aashiq Abu's Crazy, Relentless Love Letter To Guns And The Games Men Play
With an ensemble of wild performances and some amazingly well-choreographed action sequences, 'Rifle Club' takes us back to a time when all a film needed to do was be cool.
Director: Aashiq Abu
Writers: Syam Pushkaran, Dileesh Karunakaran, Suhas
Cast: Dileesh Pothan, Anurag Kashyap, Hanumankind, Vani Vishwanath, Surabhi Lakshmi
Language: Malayalam
In Aashiq Abu’s Rifle Club, manliness is next to godliness. It’s set in a hyper-violent world with no room for peaceful resolutions or around-the-table diplomacy. An eye for an eye is the only diktat, and it’s the meanest, most frenetic Western you’re likely to see from one of our Southern-most states.
It takes place in 1991 and this gives the film a pre-woke recklessness that’s rare in a film set in today’s time. Instead, the film’s allegiance to machismo is so on-the-nose that it doesn’t even try to hide the many phallic symbols that “rise” from subtext to text. In a chilling scene, when an outsider asks Itty (a killer Vani Vishwanath) if he can speak to the man of the house, she forces him to look down, pointing at her loaded pistol. This is not your average household in which women are valued based on their looks or their ability to cook. For members of the Rifle Club, what matters most is the ability to shoot, gender notwithstanding.
In this mad context, the men that feel out of place are those that appear most normal—characters like a doctor or a vicar. When one these women looks at a dead wild boar, she stares straight at its genitals and complains about how small they are. And when a nameless character dies, they don’t make up a name for him based on his language or the clothes he wears. His identity is based solely on the gun he packs. “Great guns do not have owners. They only have successors,” a character says.
At the core of Rifle Club is a straightforward home-invasion drama, but the embellishments are what makes it this much fun. Come to think of it, the film works just as well as a coming-of-age drama for a character named Shahjahan (Vineeth Kumar) who visits the Rifle Club to “man up”. He is the new romantic superstar of Malayalam cinema and he’s urged by his entourage to undergo a trial by fire at the Rifle Club to transform himself into an action hero. And what’s the film he wants to prepare for? Vettamrugam (The Hunting Beast).
The theme of a hunt extends right through Rifle Club, with hunters often switching over to become the hunted. For Avaran (Dileesh Pothan), the secretary of Rifle Club, the only quality that matters in a person is his “hunting mind”. Even the animals we see around their forest estate are valued based on how tasty their meat is. It is in this context that we see the entry of a character the film refers to as the tiger, a North Indian weapons dealer named Dayanand (Anurag Kashyap). When we see him here, he’s even dressed in leopard print.
It is so easy for all these ideas to feel ridiculously over-the-top, but Aashiq Abu plants us so firmly into this world that we feel there was no other way to tell this story. So, when the camera closes in on the patriarch Lonappan (Vijayaraghavan) right before a major shootout, we see him express his excitement through a mischievous half-smile, as though he’s been waiting for this moment right since he was a child.
The staging of the action scenes is wild, and the stakes just keep getting bigger with each action block. This is not the kind of film in which you’re expected to feel for any character, nor does it pursue an emotional arc for anyone. When it’s time for a character to reveal that he’s going to become a father, there’s no speech with champagne glasses clinking. He reveals this right in the middle of a fight by simply saying that his baby is…“loading”.
All these lines lead us to think of just how much fun it must have been to write this film. Characters like Darshana Rajendran get some of the best lines because they’re made to speak in the Malayalam of the early '90s. This includes archaic expressions like “Chumbanam” for a kiss or the poetic movie titles Shahjahan has been working on. With so much room for double entendre, the jokes just simply write themselves, like it must have when a character says he finds artists to be cowards because they never do anything. Or when an old lady enters the room of a newly eloped couple and urges them to not waste time eating. It’s as though the writers were waiting for this one film to use a kinky part of their brain they can never use again.
Not that the film is all about the shallow fun that comes with a bunch of trigger-happy criminals shooting each other while cracking double-meaning jokes. The film begs us to read deeper into it, especially when we see a half-nude bad guy sporting a pair of American flag-themed boxers. The fact that it takes place in 1991 also makes for some interesting reading, as this is right when the market opened up for goods (and guns) from all over the world. If you can't bother with all that, there’s also the meta-fun you experience when you see Dileesh Pothan and Anurag Kashyap, two or our finest filmmakers, engaging in a shootout that includes dialogues about Spaghetti Westerns and Mexican standoffs. With an ensemble of wild performances and some amazingly well-choreographed action sequences, Rifle Club takes us back to a time when all a film needed to do was be cool.