Thinking Out Loud

Terrorism; the word on the lips of many fear-inducing conversations, apocalyptic visions and knock-knock jokes. What is it all about? Kamal Haasan takes this touchy subject as the underlying theme of his latest film "Vishwaroopam", a slow burning thriller, which is more than your run-of-the-mill shootout with an open-ended climax, paving way for Vishwaroopam-2 (hopefully we get to see the sequel). Without mulling over the story too much, which is after all, a classic battle story between the good and evil (but the defining lines are murky), we see the "behind the scenes" of what makes a terrorist, their ideals and the indoctrination of children to make them fight against anything and everything that is not part of the terrorists' belief system. It is a relief to watch fully fleshed-out characters of terrorists (or fighters as they likes to call themselves), whereas one-dimensional terrorists were the norm in most films. The training of Al-Qaeda by the protag...

What makes a good or even great action movie? There are websites to look this up, surely. But, what makes a good/great Tamil action movie? If we were to go by the popular Tamil movie reviewers and audiences (for 2012), Thuppakki (Gun) seems to be the one, edging others out. I despair as prominent director A. R. Murugadoss dumbs down a story that made me want to slit my wrists or moreover kill myself with a thuppakki that Vijay produces in the movie, as an option for one of the bad guys to take his own life. There is a hero Jagdish (Vijay), a silly sidekick Balaji (Sathyan), a sillier heroine Nisha (Kajal Agarwal) and the villain/bad guy/terrorist (what else is new?) with a roundhouse kick which challenges that of Chuck Norris, Vidyut Jamwal (dude has no name; no, not akin to the Dollars trilogy, he's just a puppet terrorist, almost to the point of being cute) and some others who die and some who don't. Story? Hmmm, good guy defeats the bad guy, and in-between he manages to s...