Cast: Ajith Kumar, Arjun, Prem Gi Amaran, Trisha Music: Yuvan Shankar Raaja Direction: Venkat Prabu
‘Money, Money, Money, Money, Money,’ groans Ajith, as if it’s a burden. In Mangatha, money does indeed get burdensome. Probably the first full-fledged heist film in Tamil, the problem of the robbers here is not how to steal the money but how to safeguard it from being stolen further. Five hundred crores of it stashed away in an old warehouse in Mumbai should be a cause for celebration, which it does become, only briefly, because the celebration itself quickly turns nasty. On the hindsight, the robbers would not have allowed even that minor celebration.
Mangatha is a chess game on steroids. If you’ll excuse the noisy re-recording and ‘inspired’ theme music, it is an excellent example of how Tamil films have come of age. If Endhiran tested the contours of technology, Mangatha evolved in the high-octane action thrillers of The Italian Job variety. We haven’t seen such true action thrillers in Tamil that didn’t egregiously glorified the ‘hero’ character. Prabu even transcends that limitation by making Ajith the no-grey baddie. Well, a lot of grey baddie, if you can get the pun. There is no juvenile twist in the end to show that Ajith is after all an Assistant Commissioner playing a baddie ‘intentionally’ to nab the gangsters or, in another extreme, that he had turned a bad guy because of a long, excruciating flashback. In Mangatha he is a bad guy because, well, he is simply bad. What a refreshing change that was!
The milieu is Venkat Prabu’s forte of ensemble cast. Plenty of characters get introduced, plenty of dialogues are exchanged, and several plans are unveiled and myriad schemes drawn up. You also get Prabu’s usual single entendre’s on sex and alcohol; his liberal, ardent allusions to other Tamil films and his obsessive tribute to Rajinikanth, all of them are present in their usual dosage. On top of that a highly complex heist, not the very robbing of it because, as mentioned, it all gets over in less than five minutes and seems too good to be true. As you begin to show some signs of weariness, the actual game begins.
We don’t know who has got what cards up their sleeve and we are constantly at an edge to figure out who is going to outsmart whom. Although instinctively we know that in the end Ajith would outsmart all the other conmen, we still don’t know how. If you don’t already know the ending, you would not know until the very end, in which Venkat Prabu truly pulls off a coup d’état. He plays a clever, cheeky game where something is hidden, something is revealed and even the ones with the right cards end up losing. True to the title!
