Actor-politician Udhayanidhi Stalin has returned to the big screen with Kalaga Thalaivan — a corporate espionage thriller. The film, directed by Maghizh Thirumeni, knits together a compelling cat and mouse chase, but fails to convincingly deliver on its larger message: the problem of corporate funding in politics. The hero-intro scene that Udhayanidhi gets is rather off-beat for Kollywood. He covertly remote accesses a computer to help an older colleague struggling to complete a task while a supervisor watches on, waiting for the older man to mess up. This is definitely less dramatic than his entry in his previous Nenjukku Needhi — visualise a car window, reflecting a mountain sun rise (the DMK party symbol), rolling down to reveal our hero’s face. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of that movie.
Kalaga Thalaivan isn’t entirely without political commentary, of course. The title translates to ‘Rebel Leader’, which is quite baffling, given that the DMK has been in power for over a year in the state and Udhaynidhi himself is an elected MLA and party youth wing leader. If the rebellion that the actor-politician’s character, Thiru, is leading is against privatisation of the public sector and the ecological and democratic damages that corporates wreak, the film doesn’t do a particularly impactful job of getting us to feel strongly about it.
Thiru works as a financial analyst for an automobile giant called Vajrah. The company makes headlines that their new line of lorries can cut fuel consumption by 50%, but hides the fact that vehicular emission will be far above the permissible level. The rest of the film revolves around Vajrah’s many earlier corporate crimes, ties to various governments, and Thiru’s attempt to expose them. Once Vajrah catches on to a leak in their midst, they hire Arjun (Arav) and his team to find their leak. Arjun, an ex-military man, who now works in corporate security, is described as a “psychopathic killer”. At this point, I’m absolutely close to giving up on asking Kollywood to do a little more work on their villains than just throwing around random psychological terms. But of course, Arjun’s bloody and obsessive hunt for Thiru ensues, with the odds against the hero stacked high.
Director Magizh accomplishes the slow reveal of who Thiru really is and his reason to go after Vajrah well, which builds up intriguingly until the intermission block. The director also gives us a neatly made chase sequence at a railway station right before the interval. The sequence is a slow-burn, set at just the perfect temperature, to draw us in. It also throws up just enough plot twists to keep us guessing about the second half of the film. Magizh also introduces into play, Karthik (a criminally underused Kaliayarasan).
How Arjun tracks down Thiru and discovers his reasons for wanting to destroy Vajrah is the rest of the film, with some romantic detours made to introduce the mandatory heroine.
Thiru’s love interest, Mythili (Nidhhi Agerwal), is a presence that contributes little to the story except for Thiru to show off his deduction skills. Shortly after meeting her, Thiru concludes that she is a “strong-willed, independent, and highly organised woman” based on some pop-psychology about the kind of handbag she uses. All this seems to be forced into the film only to tell us that Thiru, unlike most other Kollywood heroes, is appreciative of women with such personalities. Unfortunately, nothing much about Nidhhi’s superficial acting or her characterisation in the script recommends that we arrive at similar conclusions about Mythili. The romance only serves to upset the pacing of the plot, rather than be a meaningful segment of it.
Thiru is written as a reserved man, not usually given to highly emotional outbursts, which suits Udhayanidhi as an actor. He seems to do well in such roles, giving us a convincing impression of a man tormented by his past but hiding it in order to see justice done. Despite its deep flaws, his character in Nenjukku Needhi too had come across as a singularly driven man. Both are a far and merciful move away from his rom-com roles such as in Oru Kal Oru Kannadi.
Where this film fails is in impressing us about its larger politics, except in a few scattered scenes. As much as Kalaga Thalaivan claims that its villains are the corporates who grab land from indigenous communities and destroy the local environment by tying up with political powers, the film doesn’t do enough to establish this. For the majority of the film, Thiru is directly in conflict with Arjun, whose own obsessive determination to stop the hero isn’t believable. Arav is menacing due to the body count his character racks up, but not much else. He comes off more disconnected rather than threatening with his deliberately unemotional dialogue delivery.
There’s one point at which the film does manage to deliver on its politics, though it’s not nearly enough. One person working against Vajrah asks, “You all talk about money for votes, have you ever asked how much corporate funding goes to political parties?” This is a fitting question. Films like Vijay-starrer Sarkar blame political corruption on the poorest people, who they allege sell off their votes. Personally, I have always had a rankling question about these movies: why should the weight of protecting democracy fall on the most financially vulnerable? Kalaga Thalaivan also hopes to redirect attention to where the rot lies, but fails to write a script that digs deeply enough into the problem.
If the film had done more to establish what it is that corporate powers do, rather than focusing on a badly written villain like Arjun who is only a means to an end, Kalaga Thalaivan may have been a far stronger film.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.