Thug Life Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
One of the first lines in Thug Life is Kamal Haasan talking in voice-over:
“The lord of death is very fond of me.” and calls himself a born Yakuza.
Can you guess, just a wild estimate, and APPROXIMATION if you wish, what the tone of this film is going to be?
Sure enough, after that opening scene, you’re very clear about the scale of this film, visually and tonally. Also, right on cue, just a few sequences later, you realise this grandiosity is in service of scarcely anything larger than men talking to men about men while women twirl somewhere around them, as wives, bar dancers, or girlfriends with pregnancy tests.
Director Mani Ratnam’s Thug Life is supposed to be a cinematic event. His exhibition of a world of violence, vanity, and vintage vengeance. His long-awaited team-up with Kamal Haasan after Nayakan, a pairing so potent on paper that even opening-partner logos got cheers in the theatre — that’s how excited this houseful theatre around me was.
The story is a straightforward amalgam of rage, grudges, and action set pieces high on their own supply. At the centre is Rangaraya Sakthivel, played by Kamal Haasan, who, we are told — in a black-and-white flashback of 1994 Delhi, rescues a young boy during his own gang’s brutal shootout with the police. In true Indian cinema fashion, turns out the boy also has a 4-year-old sister lost in the crowd. The boy goes with Sakthivel; the girl goes missing. This sister, named Chandra, we are promised will be an important emotional focus of the story, who lies completely forgotten through most of the film. So, not just thematically, women are LITERALLY also lost in this film.
Fast forward to 2016: Sakthivel is now a real estate mafia/mogul person, strutting around with the smugness of a man who sort of KNOWS he can survive an avalanche because the film he is designed to be in will turn it into a very cool scene. He has a bar dancer girlfriend, Indrani (played by Trisha), a devoted, suffering wife at home (played by Abhirami), a brother, a daughter, an empire. Why he has two women, both of whom begrudgingly acknowledge each other’s presence, and why that’s a universally normalised situation in this film, I didn’t get at all. In moments later, when Sakthivel is broken, hurting, all he wants to do is get back to his wife. He says, “The thought of you kept me going,” upon meeting her again.
Arey! Indrani? You claim to love her just as much. Are we going to address how weird this is, or are we at the point where Indian cinema is largely a fantasy playground for whatever men want it to be? The wife exists to be of service to Sakthivel. The girlfriend does the same — while wearing a backless blouse. Neither has a thought or desire beyond the man they orbit like moons.
The young rescued boy is Amar — the adult version played by an excellent Silambarasan, a performance above the material he’s working with. Charismatic, conflicted, and gorgeously shot by Ravi K. Chandran, Amar is designed to be the moral compass for the film, and for Sakthivel himself. What happens when a man’s circumstances make him do things that are very removed from the nature of who he is?
However, this moral conundrum doesn’t get the careful consideration it deserves because structurally, Thug Life is a mess. Characters appear, die, disappear, or switch allegiances rapidly. Ali Fazal shows up, gets slapped thrice by Mahesh Manjrekar, and vanishes until the very last act. What his character is up to in the interim doesn’t matter. The slapping scene occurs in the same house from Animal — I’m convinced it’s the same sofa where Ranbir and Anil Kapoor screamed at each other, toh vibe hi uss building ki off hai. Rajshri Deshpande, who plays Ali Fazal’s MOTHER (??), stands outside and listens — because women are entirely unnecessary, obviously. While Ali disappears, the antagonist shifts at least three times before the interval.
Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan, who shares the writing credit, both attempt to bring all the subplots together in the third act. Threads are tied, characters collide, flashbacks are filled in. And yet, they aren’t able to justify the existence of a larger world at stake. The stakes are hyper-personal: betrayals, vendettas, one-upmanship — never about something beyond the central alpha. It’s too dramatic to be relatable, and simultaneously too thin to be an epic.
Mani Ratnam has never shied away from embedding his characters into political or historical contexts. His films place human choices within larger landscapes. Even if you’re just familiar with his Hindi-language filmography — Bombay, Dil Se, Yuva, Guru — all tell stories of people as their lives intersect and interact with the city they’re in, the specific time period, and what the nation is going through in the moment. Not that these are important or imperative things to talk about each time, but Thug Life seems allergic to world-building.
What does Sakthivel’s power mean, considering you’re TELLING us he operates his illegal empire from Delhi? Does his work affect the economy, the people, the politics? Does anyone care if he vanishes or comes back? What happens when he goes away?
I did find some moments of levity:
A cop who magically appears after every crime, like he has Google Alerts set for “kaheen violence ho toh batana.”
A henchman magnificently called Kanjirapally Pathros.
Nassar is having a gala time.
Sanya Malhotra dancing in one song.
And various Kamal Haasan hairdos to admire.
These things, to a certain extent, help you forget the gaps in writing — like straight-up using coincidence to solve a major subplot.
Existing squarely between narcissism and nihilism, Thug Life cannot be summed up as good or bad. For Kamal Haasan fans, it’s decidedly a treat — even if it fails to become the gripping tale of power and redemption it aspired to be.
The movie is now in theatres.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, Thug Life is… 234. That’s how many films Kamal Haasan has acted in — this is literally his TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOURTH film as lead actor. Wild.
