Ever since turning an independent director with Gentleman in 1993, S Shankar has mostly excelled in telling vigilante stories centred around themes of corruption and resultant instabilities in our society.

In Gentleman, he told the story of corruption in the education sector of Tamil Nadu, particularly in professional areas like medicine and engineering, which was alleged to be controlled by politicians, either directly or through proxies. The protagonist, a distraught Brahmin youth, who donned the role of Robinhood to steal from banks, public coffers and the wealthy in order to build a pedagogical empire that gave education free from kindergarten to the highest level of professional education.

Shankar followed it up with movies like Indian(1996), and Mudhalvan (1999) with corruption as the main plot while other projects like Anniyan (2005), essentially a psychological thriller, and Sivaji(2007), a corporate rivalry story, both had corruption as clear underlying themes. If it was a septuagenarian vigilante smoothly eliminating the corrupt in India, it was a journalist who turned crusader against corrupt politicians. In Anniyan, though, the main protagonist with a split personality alternates with legal fights and violence to take on the corrupt.  

Shankar’s films became superhits as he engaged such social causes by blending them with the mass appeal formula with action-packed and song-and-dance ingredients backed by spectacular visuals and lavish sets which endeared his movies to not just the Tamil audience and across South India, but also other parts of the country with dubbed versions of most of his movies regularly faring in Hindi movie channels. 

While the ace director has repeated this success formula in 13 of his movies until 2018, his latest outing after almost 6 years, Indian-2 has, however, cast a shadow on the endurance of his filmmaking style. Also in question is whether his continuing reliance on social causes, chiefly corruption in society, will be able to garner the kind of receptibility his earlier films did.

The reason for such scepticism is the disastrous show that Indian-2 had at the box office with reports suggesting that the film could not rake in even 65 per cent of its supposedly Rs 250 crore budget. After the initial hype, the film, which has been in the making since 2019, failed to stir the audience. Even the attempt to create a nationwide impact, with the Hindi version titled Hindustani-2, was shot down by reviewers in the national media, with a prominent reviewer describing the movie as a three-hour time suck.

With the theatre running elapsing quickly and the movie showing up on an OTT platform, however, did not change its fortunes, at least in terms of the perception of a ‘flop movie’. This forms a significant aspect as the third part of the franchise is also slated to come up. Kamal Hassan had himself revealed before the release of Indian-2 that the shooting for the third part is already complete and is in post-production.

The Shankar-Hassan duo was planning to do a Ponniyan Selvan repeat in Tamil cinema, hoping for a similar success and following on the heals of Bahubali and KGF, and possibly Pushpa. However, unlike all these movies, the Indian-2 experiment went abysmally wrong thus raising questions about the fate of the third sequel. Yet, the release of Indian-2 is imminent not just in terms of recovering the cost of production but also to enable a closure for the plot that Indian-2 leaves incomplete, midway.

This structuring, which attempted to break the plot into two parts, might have been at the core of Indian-2’s failure. To be fair to Shankar and his co-writers, the gravity of the message needed an elongated narrative, which, if compressed into one movie, could have caused a dissonance in the story-telling arch with the ‘hero’s journey’ abruptly broken in a hurried cinematic cacophony. Yet, Shankar fatigued the audience for a three-hour journey even in the first part of the sequel without providing them with a convincing epilogue could have been among the reasons for the sequel’s rejection and very little anticipation for its final part or yearning for a closure.  

For all the negative reviews the film garnered, and the bare few voices of support being shouted down, Indian-2 certainly deserved a better reception and recognition, particularly for the message it was trying to convey to the masses.

Why Indian-2 failed to impress?

The Shankar touch was there throughout, but with grave shortcomings that cleaved through the cinematic journey.   

In the first version of the movie released in 1996, when India had a completely different discourse on corruption, Kamal Hassan came in a double role – one as an Indian National Army veteran, Senapathy, who runs a covert crusade against corruption in the society, and the second as the son, Chandru, who is found to be part of the corruption eco-system, and is killed in the climax scene by the father. While Senapathy was seemingly a septuagenarian in the 1996 version, it is difficult to discern any notable change in him despite a 26-year time lapse.

The inability to transport characters and their physical evolution despite the plot attaining a contemporary context could be cited as among the key shortcomings in the visual narrative.

Besides Senapathy maintaining the physical composure 26 years down the line, when he should be presumed to be in his 90s in that cinematic universe, the movie extensively uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to recreate late actors, Nedumudi Venu and Vivek, in full-fledged roles throughout the movie. While the AI applications could have worked to some impressive levels, Venu’s role could have been limited to a few short and convincingly reprised by the key prominence given to his son’s character. Similarly, Vivek’s character seemed to be avoidable borrowing from a similar role in Anniyan. 

Many reviews attributed such screenwriting shortcomings to the missing influence of Sujatha (S. Rangarajan), the noted writer, who passed away in 2008. Though Sujatha was mainly the dialogue writer for many Shankar movies, including the first version of Indian, Shankar’s scripts were said to have gained a level of creative depth when passing through Sujatha’s oversight. 

The music department suffered immensely with none of the songs making any stir in the hit charts. A.R. Rahman’s music was the highlight of the 1996 movie, even though some reviewers, who are unable to comprehend the populist ethos of Tamil film music, termed the Hindi version of some songs of the first Indian/Hindustani movie’s lyrics as ‘outlandish’. Indian-2 suffered when the music department was handed over to Anirudh Ravichander, who could not repeat the magic expected out of him as in the Vikram encore.

While lavish sets and action scenes continued to hold the fort for Shankar in Indian-2, an element of implausibility crept into the extensive usage of Varmam martial arts by Senapathy, whose macho muscularity as a nonagenarian (going by the 26 years calculation) invited much contempt. Essentially a derivative of Marma Vidya, which, besides its medical applications, could also be used for targeting pressure or sensory points in the body to decapitate an adversary, the overkill of Varmam action scenes could have reminded the Tamil audience of the overdose of the supposed Bodhidharma action scenes in 7 Aum Arivu, the 2011 Surya starrer.

Besides these aspects, the core reason why Indian-2 failed to strike a chord with the audience was seemingly how Shankar sought to engage the question of corruption in contemporary times. While the audience expected a cinematic experience in which Senapathy engages in a series of adventurous campaigns against corrupt politicians, businessmen and officials of the contemporary, Shankar, instead, decided on a dialectical interrogation of the problem of corruption and its deep-rooted embeddedness in the Indian society.

An unimpressed audience, which had come with expectations of an adventure in vigilantism and hoping to relish the rich and mighty being punished in ways they could aspire only onscreen, was instead treated to a discourse that sought self-introspection and corruption is a social phenomenon with roots embedded in every Indian family.

Are Indians inherently corrupt? 

The storytelling arc in Indian-2 goes on the predictable arc in Acts one and two. A gang of inspired youth crusading against corruption in the government, education, job recruitment and the business sector. When constantly suppressed by the authorities, the youth run a campaign for Indian Taatha (Indian Grandpa or Sethupathy) to return to India and take on the corrupt. In Act two, Sethupathy, living a secret life in Taiwan, decides to return to India, manages to give the slip to CBI at the airport and initiates his crusade against the corrupt.

The twist comes in Act three when the vigilante youth start facing backlash from their families after turning over their close family members, seen to be indulging in various acts of corruption, to the vigilance. While most of these youth initially feel satiated in exposing even their corrupt family members, the situation turns grave when the leader of the gang, Chitra Aravindan (played by Siddharth) ends up exposing his father, a rigid vigilance officer (played by Samuthirakani), who was revealed as making backdoor deals with the corrupt officials he raids. Following his arrest, Chithra's mother commits suicide which leads to backlash from society, forcing the gang of youth to turn against Sethupathy for ‘abetting’ them against their families.   

Act three and the movie ends with the society and corrupt forces teaming up to hound Sethupathy, who makes a hasty retreat, but only to promise the audience that he will be back.

While Act three turned out to be unremarkable for most of the audience, which was the evident reason for the movie’s failure, the twist in the tale was invariably the USP of the movie that Shankar tried to present and project. Needless to emphasize, Shankar was inherently pointing to the deep-rooted existence of corruption as a social ethos in Indian society even when the society at large pretends to abhor and counter it.

Though most movies, including those of Shankar, have focused on political, bureaucratic and corporate corruption at the top of the social ladder, Shankar’s previous films like Indian and Anniyan have shown glimpses of how corruption touches every section of society irrespective of economic class or social status. While Anniyan depicts a scene where the negligence by a corrupt power corporation lineman could end up in deaths in a rain-drenched street, Indian (1996) kept a core focus on bribery as an endemic social problem.

Reflecting upon the essential tendency of Indians to resort to bribes as a fundamental way of life, Sethupathy, in the 1996 movie, proclaims: “Luncham vangirathum thappu, kodikirathum thappu (Taking bribe is wrong, giving bribe is also wrong)!  

In Act three, Shankar places the spotlight on the fact that families tolerate and justify the corrupt within their family and also encourage corrupt means to get their things done. While the public clamours against corruption as a practice of the high and mighty, there is a gracious incentive to indulge in corruption if the ends are to their benefit. The hallmark of Indian-2 is precisely this attempt to expose the social hypocrisy over corruption that is innate to the Indian society and how the narrative is twisted by the average Indian citizens to justify their own acts of corruption, and sustenance of a corrupt eco-system.

It is significant to note that despite numerous legislations to strengthen the anti-corruption framework and augment punitive actions, corruption has only changed its colour in India rather than being eradicated, by any measure. Indians may also recall the Anna Hazare movement of 2011 which promised a revolution against corruption in the country. Relevant it could be to note a statement overheard on the sidelines of the Anna Hazare movement: “Ninety-nine percent of the citizens participating in this movement will go back to their corrupt ways from next week or month, if not tomorrow.”

Neither have institutions like Lokpal or Lokayukta made even the slightest impact nor created any form of deterrence against corruption in the country, which, in fact, has now attained a political colour with the ruling regime using investigative agencies to target opposition parties while avoiding scrutiny of its own coffers. Corruption exists rampantly in all segments and sections of Indian society with the kind of intensity and penetration it had even after the promulgation of these institutions and numerous legislations to that effect.

In that context, Shankar’s attempt to frame the discourse on corruption by placing the spotlight on society’s tolerance for and assimilation of corruption is praiseworthy. The inherent message Shankar tries to convey is the imperativeness of eradicating corruption from the lowest units of society, which are the individual and family.

While this message is clear in Act three of the movie, irrespective of whether the audience grasped or accepted it, it needs to be seen how Shankar has found the solution for this in Indian-3, assuming the film will hit the screen in the coming months. The plot and fate of Indian-3 aside, the scourge of corruption – both moral and monetary – is not likely to vanish or be decimated from Indian society anytime soon.