Mangatha

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!

Adukalam

Cast: Dhanush, Tapsee, Va Se Jeyabalan Music: GV Prakash, Direction: Vetrimaaran

It's not very often you get into a movie with hall with enormous anxiousness mixed with immense hope. It's rarely for the actor but always for the director; you invest so much faith in the director and when he turns around, slips under your grip and tells you, with a sombre face that you dread, that he is not in that league, it hurts.

Adukalam misses so many milestones that it requires heavy dose of suspension of disbelief to continue to respond to Vetrimaaran's second outing. Why, and why Vetrimaaran could not deliver another Pollathavan is a nagging question that you'll never find answer to. Perhaps only speculate about, at your own peril.

Having said all those nasty things, Adukalam indeed does have a fresh story of Shakespearan proportion - a rural Othello with serious complexities. It has powerhouse performances, especially from Dhanush, and a very sincere effort from Vetrimaaran. The mileu too is very earthy.

What failed me was the kitch of presentation. A modern City of Gods type introduction to a film that's rural in its core jarred hard. Such a stylish introduction may be fit for an Italian Job type of action thriller but Adukalam? I can understand that the intro was intended to ease up the complexity of the story and the characters, but it hurries impatiently briefing us about all the important characters and the problems of cock fighting and then the style suddenly disappears and we are brought to a small town in the realism of Bharatiraaja. This jarring, 'switching on the tube light in the middle of the night' kind of irritation notwithstanding GV Prakash blares as much of his intruments and Macintosh loops that he could muster into your ears that your head explodes. I was so enraged I wanted to knock off the fuse from his studio.

The film starts with a prologue to cock-fighting by a narrator that sounds as sincere as a yesteryear's Films Division newsreel and then the narrator suddenly disappears. Who is this narrator, is he one of the characters or is he an omniscient observer? Where did he disappear after the film has started? After the abrupt disappearance of the omnicient director into the chaos of the scenes that unfolded, the group rivalry about cockfighting and the love interest of the protagonist are played in a tearing hurry. Are we witnessing the invasion of editing software into the domain of the director? Why do filmmakers after filmmakers believe in the Final Cut Pro software more than their own script?

Whilst the rural part of the story is played with honesty, Vetrimaaran's portrayal of Anglo-Indian community is less than convincing, which is only made worse by a plasticised acting by Tapsee.

As I watched with anguish the slipping away of the movie, with some occasional brilliance once in a while, I couldn't help wonder what could have made my experience better. A more restrained approach from GV Prakash? A more satisfying ending? A better performing heroine? Relaxed editing?

Neverthelees, Vetrimaaran still holds the promise. Despite the gloomy portrayal of the previous paragraphs, Adukalam is still highly watchable and is more sincere than any other contemporary excrement downloaded by the Tamil cinema as a whole. Remember, a disappointed fan tends to be more critical than the impassioned critique.

What's difficult to understand was what compelled or restrained Vetrimaaran. Will his next venture repay the promise vested in him by his aredent fans like myself? Or will he go down the path of other directors with failed promises such as Cheran, Gautam Menon, etc.?

Talking about Gautam Menon, I heard his Nadunisi Naaygal has no songs. That's not something new but it doesn't have any background music either. Thinking about it, I couldn't help wonder how much better Adukalam would have been without any background music.

Endiran

Cast: Rajinikanth, Aiswarya Rai, Danny Denzongpa Music: AR Rahman Direction: Shankar

Now, Shankar has obviously seen Artificial Intelligence (AI), I Robot and Transformers and liked them. He has not come out of the Matrix hangover and probably never will. He likes his songs and often doesn't care where he places them in the script. He likes to amplify emotions for melodramatic effects so love comes out as lust and anger comes out as aggression. Having said all that, no one can deny that he was a pioneer of a new kind of commercial cinema, one so successful that it produced a breed of directors such as Dharani, Hari, Susi Ganesan, etc. who brazenly followed Shankaresque format. It was about time he raised the bar.

Looking at Endiran, we can only imagine the number of brainstorming sessions he must have had with writer Sujatha during all these years when he was incubating the project. Shankar will be the best judge as to how successfully it has turned out and also, at the risk of blasphemy, how much he had to compromise in order to accommodate Rajinikanth in the role.

For hardcore Rajinikanth fans, Endhiran may be quite satisfying. Here Rajini is the hero, Rajini is the villain, Rajini is the machine, the cloned robots, and at some point in the climax, Rajinis are the only things seen on the screen, other humans simply reduced to being insects caught in the storm. Those fans will simply be happy to just watch more and more of him for two and half hours. I don't think you'll find it difficult to believe in the existence of such fans. I even know of one who actually believed Baba was a good film. Nevertheless, for other Rajinikanth admirers, which comprise the entire Tamil speaking population, the film may be a bit disappointing. There are no typical Rajinikanth elements that we have come to expect. He doesn't enter the frame in the midst of drum rolls and flying confetti. He doesn't deliver 'punch dialogues'. Worse still, in a potential brawl situation, the scientist Rajini actually runs away from a lone fisherman, a stark contrast from the Rajini who made minced meat out of about fifty top rowdies of the city in Sivaji. You may say he is just a 'scientist'! Well, he was just a 'software engineer' in Sivaji and that didn't deter him from breaking their bones? As if to compensate for that, the other Rajini, the robot, pulverises goons, runs over a speeding train, leaps forward and backward across a flyover from a speeding car amidst chasing police vans, and demolishes army battalions in a mad frenzy.

Leaving aside the Rajini factor, the film's landscape and vision is impressive and at times breathtaking. That it has taken Shankar courage to think up such a story, albeit with ample support from Sujatha and Karky, and execute it effectively calls for commemoration. Although actors who are much younger and more agile such as Shah Rukh Khan would have fit the role more convincingly, who, but Shankar, would have thought that Rajinikanth can fit into the role? And what would Shankar had been thinking when he was reworking on the script to fit Rajinikanth? Well, did he even make those changes?

More than how the movie itself has turned out, it is worth noting what the movie represents as a commercial product, especially to Tamil film industry. Shankar never claimed to change the nuances of Tamil cinema. He is not a Balu Mahendra and never claimed to be. However, in his own small way, or shall we say 'big budget way', Shankar has changed the way commercial films are conceived, made, and even marketed. He introduced the concept of 'blockbuster' to South Indian film industries. In that sense, Gentleman was to Tamil cinema what Jaws was to Hollywood. He exploited the concept of saturation release with Sivaji, now being done by almost every second producer in the South. The term blockbuster originated from the warfare technology, connected with the powerful aerial bombs of World War II that were capable of destroying whole housing blocks. With Endhiran, Shankar has introduced another warfare term 'carpet bombing' to film marketing. Regardless of which weaponry you are applying to market your product, if you don't have impressive script filled with great original ideas, it will actually be your film that will be bombed. I don't know if Shankar thinks about marketing at all during the scripting phase. I would like to think he doesn't. Some would claim that he doesn't need to. Whatever may be the case, one thing is sure: no other Tamil filmmaker thinks like Shankar.

Angadi Theru

Cast: Mahesh, Anjali, A.Venkatesh Music: GV Prakash & Vijay Antony Direction: Vasantha Balan

Melodrama is not an Indian invention. The term originally referred to 18th and 19th century European dramas where music and songs were used to heighten the emotion. Then in the 50s Douglas Sirk made the term famous among the modern audience. However, the use of this genre in Indian films was so prevalent that until the late 80s, the genre of large number our films could only be defined as ‘melodrama’.

As the taste of the audience grew and became more sensitive, and as many directors became inspired by other influences such as New Wave and Neo Realism, our films changed tone, tenor and texture. In Tamil, directors like Balu Mahendra, Barathiraja and Bala used Neo Realism effectively in Indian context. However, losing melodrama altogether was not possible. For almost four decades people were fed on it non-stop and the antidote had to be gradual lest the withdrawal symptoms would be severe and unbearable.

Thus was born another formula unique to Indians. A fusion of melodrama and neo-realism: the two incompatible elements cleverly fused together to provide a different cinematic experience. A combination of Vittorio de Sica and Douglas Sirk would have been unimaginable and therefore unpalatable to a western taste bud was lapped up eagerly by the Indians. The Bala school pioneered this (probably often unaware of what they were doing) movement joined actively by soldiers from another unlikely institution: The Shankar school.

Vasantha Balan’s Angadi Theru pays ample tributes to Bala school while remaining true to Shankar’s action melodrama techniques. It works like as if Shankar had written the script but gave it to Bala to direct. This kitsch must have been an inedible concoction but it surprisingly works, simply because of the sincerity of Balan’s intentions and his consciously woven multi-layered script.

Angadi Theru which tells the story of the workers of a large Indian style departmental store in Chennai’s most famous shopping area, Ranganathan Street, has all the elements of a Shankar film. It has opinionated social angst, drama, action, stereotyped villains and a comedy track in the midst of the misery. The villains are so loud they grit their teeth and always look angry. As if that wouldn’t produce the desired aversion, they pick their nose and smell the gooey.

On the other hand, the protagonists are normal people with normal problems. They drop out of school due to dire economic conditions, take up jobs just to support family and sleep on the pavements. The main protagonists are people from villages who have come on employment with their ‘urban dream’. There are ample subplots involving a dwarf and a sex-worker, a blind hand-kerchief seller an underage girl working as domestic servant, a caretaker of a public toilet, and a couple working in the same departmental store whose secondary love story plays an influential role on the main protagonists. In a way, true to the principles of established scriptwriting techniques, each of these subplots in some way connects to the main characters and influences their decisions. Douglas Sirk would have been proud to see that Vasantha Balan even makes liberal use of ‘melodramatic objects’, a technique Sirk pioneered that helps to establish and narrate romantic emotions.

Fusions are not without their problems. In Angadi Theru, Vasantha Balan oscillates between his desire to be judgemental and pragmatic. Neo Realism prefers to depict situations as they are. Melodrama not only articulates opinions but even amplifies them for heightened impact. The heavy set background music and action-packed plot developments heighten the mood and certain dialogues and exaggerated character development sensationalise what are otherwise very natural events. This disturbs at times although the overall effect is kind of a surreal dream charged with emotional power where you’re made part of and that participation without your permission. You're shake your head in disagreement at certain opinionated depictions whilst anxiously caring for the characters. Isn't it a success for Vasantha Balan?

Angadi Theru is one of the films in the line up of the modern phenomenon that’s sweeping Tamil industry. What started off as a quiet, reticent initiatives by Balu Mahendra and spontaneous burst of energy from Barathiraja have now become an active and conscious movement. Guided mostly by the Bala school but also helped by a few handful directors from outside this new generation directors are now reengineering Tamil cinema. Vasantha Balan is one of proud soldiers among them. They are unapologetic about the films they make. They are skilled, technically savvy yet highly rooted in the culture. They don’t pick up their inspiration from DVD rental stores. They look at our society for story ideas. And our society rewards them by offering plenty of plots. And plenty more subplots than they could reasonably close in a single film.

Endiran - a preview

Attempting technology-based films is a dicey game in India. The filmmaker will have to overcome many barriers in order to even successfully communicate the story, leave alone entertain. Many such valiant attempts in the past have bitten the dust miserably. Vikram, Kamal Hasssan’s answer to James Bond was more than laughed at by the audience. Many others, trying to balance their eagerness to do a ‘Hollywood style’ thriller with the taste of local audience, diluted the presentation so much that it often resulted of garish, shoddy outputs.

With today’s audience, the nature of the trouble has changed. In urban pockets, they have seen all the Hollywood blockbusters so it is difficult to meet their high expectations and also they approach Indian products with certain level of cynicism.
In this respect, when a filmmaker sets out to make an Indian film about a robot, words whisper around about inspiration from Terminator, I Robot, etc. Endiran, arguably the first Indian film on robots, has to bear that weight. The presence of Rajinikanth is going to level the playing field to large extent as in his fans are going to be more forgiving of the technological compromises. And the good thing for him is most of Tamil speaking peoples can be safely considered as his fans, only with a varying degree of devotion and fanaticism.

The curious question is how is Shankar going to tell this story? Is the robot going to be created by the scientist Rajinikanth to fight society’s evils? Every Shankar’s movie boasts of an almost superhero who single-handedly and tirelessly destroys corruption, nepotism and bureaucracy. Has Shankar found the most powerful superhero in the form of Robot? Is Robot a cross between Iron Man and Terminator?

These are the problem a filmmaker will have to face. None of these questions would have been asked if Shankar has made a non-technological film. But a question which this blog purports to ask, and considers significant, is how is Shankar going to ‘explain’ the concept of robotics to our audience. With the exception of the urban viewers who grew up on liberal doses of Spielbergs and Camerons, the rest of the population may not even know what a robot is and is capable of. While this could be advantageous in presenting preposterous things, such an attempt may offend trained urban pockets.

So a robot that is simple enough for rural populace to understand and enjoy and ‘accurate’ enough for urban sensibilities to appreciate is the challenge Shankar should meet in Endiran. Add to that, another curious thing would be how the technology is going to be merged with Shankar’s pot-boiler formula seamlessly? For years, Rajini fans have come to expect politically charged scenes so there’s also a requirement to include such power-packed sequences to whet the appetite of hardcore Rajini fans. That’s part of the problem for the director who had to sign up with Rajini because presenting a cohesive script whilst meeting all these requirements was never an easy bargain. Added to that the hype for Rajini films kept getting bigger for every release. Sivaji effectively ticked all these boxes and once again proved Shakar’s dexterous mastery over the mass-entertainment segment. The hype went a few notches higher when Endiran was announced. Is Shankar’s robot a cross between Iron Man and Terminator fortified with the moral angst of the old man in Indian and the ferocity of Anniyan? September 24th will be as much a test for Shankar's inventivenss as it is for the Tamil audience’s readiness.

Goa

Cast: Jay, Prem Gi Amaran, Vaibhav, Sampath, Sneha, Music: Yuvan Shankar Raja, Direction: Venkat Prabhu

There’s another film that deserves social criticism, not for the same reason. Though Goa scores high on certain aspects of filmmaking departments and, on occasions, high comedy, sociological approach would better suit the content.
Venkat Prabhu came with a fresh perspective to Tamil film storytelling that had not existed, the perspective that’s going to inspire very many filmmakers of today and tomorrow. One of his stock tricks, of identifying an old, usually nostalgic, song with each of the characters and playing it in bits at strategic points in the story is clever and funny. He also has a semi-spoof tendency where his characters often enact famous scenes and characters from other films. Many filmmakers do that for comical effects but Venkat Prabhu does it to progress a story or conclude a sub-plot. That is used to a great effect (and humour) in Goa when he brings in Simbu in the form of the psycho from Manmadhan character together with psychologically disturbed Sneha with a cheeky caption ‘Corrected Machi!’ Is it also a coincidence that Sneha’s estranged husband subsequently meets Nayanthara? Is there another layer to that?

Now coming to the sociological perspective, it’s worthwhile to question how much the audience understood the story and also appreciated its boldness. It is the first Tamil film to portray an ‘ordinary’ gay couple and arguably the first Indian film to use them non-judgementally. The Indian public can’t just be considered homophobic but homo-ignorants, people who were not even aware of the existence of communities with different sexual orientation. To them, the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) are the people who are genuinely ‘queer’ to the public and are not just disapproved but even considered ‘outside’ of their normal lives, like lepers. In this respect the homophobia is at a stage higher than in other countries. This, combined with classic Indian tendency to reject anything that’s not part of their culture (that’s mainstream contemporary culture) has relegated homosexuality to the farthest of the backbenches. Till about mid-noughties, they were referred to as strange ‘beings’ spotted in the dark corners of the beach at late nights or the corners of obscure restaurants, and spoken in the same delight and astonishment accorded to a Bigfoot or Yeti.

Bridging this divide would have been immensely challenging for the sponsors of the subculture, whose attempts began in the mid-noughties with none other than the then health minister who openly made a statement about legalising homosexuality. His context was mainly about the AIDS epidemic and the need to control it and he thought that by bringing the gay community out from the underworld would be the first step towards his goal. Whatever may be the aims, coming from such an authority did create some ripples, but not enough to be of any significance. There is one thing to be remembered here though: that something becoming a ‘law’ really means nothing to an ordinary Indians. Hardly any law is respectfully obeyed and adhered to and subsequent governments, both state and central, have lost even a superficial inclination in trying to enforce it onto their billion plus citizens. In that chaotic, yet incubate environment, many counter-cultures thrive, queer being one of them.

Hence it becomes important that more than the law, an acceptable depiction in the mainstream culture becomes necessary and nothing is more dominant in Indian psyche than the influence of cinema. That’s where Goa’s achievement becomes momentous. As mentioned earlier, Goa attempts to portray a gay couple without judgement. Although it make fun of them (a few of the jokes being really crass) the fun element clearly comes from Venkat Prabhu is inherent nature of ridiculing just about everything rather than aimed at queerness disparagingly. Goa also could be the first film to look at homosexuality beyond ‘sexual overtones’. In this film the couple are endowed with normal relationship-emotions, such as love, jealousy, companionship, and they even dream of gay weddings. Though homosexuality is no longer illegal in India civil-partnerships are still far from reality. In this context, Goa goes beyond even what could legally be achieved however irrelevance that is to the filmmaker’s objectives.

The crucial question is how many people really understood what’s being portrayed? Venkat Prabhu never openly identifies them as ‘gay’ even though he graphically depicts their relationship using gender symbols. Funnily enough, it escapes attention since not many movie-going audiences in Tamil are aware of these international symbols. His success could be in providing such depiction convincingly but his failure may have been that it did not garner much attention. In other words, not many people may have understood what was happening on the screen. Personally, I believe that Venkat Prabhu may have anticipated some controversy but I’m not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed at not having generated one. In any case that doesn’t diminish the sincerity of his ambition.

It is difficult to say how much impact this film will have on people’s attitude towards sexual orientation. It is also confusing to see the society being so progressive at certain and so primitive on the other avenues. Movies like Angadi Theru (a review of this will be made shortly) that portray the residues of the society in bare disillusionment to shocking effect whilst Goa portrays a clubbing, doping crowd with assimilationist tendencies. In both films a group of disillusioned and desperate rustic venture out onto the bold and promising urban life. While one end up in streets to sleep with urchins, in other they party joyously and end up bagging beautiful women. Both have humorous overtones. Both happen in India. And that’s what’s confusing.

Singam

Cast: Surya, Prakash Raj, Nasser, Radha Ravi, Anushka, Music: Devi Sri Prasad, Direction: Hari

Some movies deserve rave reviews and some don’t deserve a review. However tempting, segregating Singam in the latter category would be unfair to the filmmaker. It must be admitted, albeit embarrasingly, that the film is immensely entertaining as it was fun to watch the ‘hero’ thrashing up the baddies to pulp, especially when the ‘hero’ happens to be Surya who delivers every punch with passionate energy with suitably accessories of his toned biceps and six packs.

Having said that, the question remains as to whether Singam deserves the ‘regular’ review. An art can be analysed in different critical approaches. A formative and structural analysis would mean looking at it from the filmmaking point of view. A sociological review will approach it from a different viewpoint. This review takes that approach for reasons that will soon become evident.

Singam tells the story of a sub-inspector from a south Indian village. Durai Singam is intelligent, honest, righteous, aggressive, strong, humble and charming. The last two qualities come handy in wooing his woman who hopelessly falls head over heels. However the first few qualities are obstructions to any police officer in India who wants to progress in his career. But he does get promoted and transferred to the capital city. The promotion is sponsored or ‘engineered’ by a city-based mafia gangster whose path crossed sub-inspector’s previously when the gangster got humiliated by the SI. The gangster believes that by bringing the SI to the city - his own bastion - will help in avenging his humiliation. Then what happens consequently forms rest of the story. The story in itself provides interesting cinematic possibilities for entertainment and the director Hari amply delivers all of them. As mentioned earlier, that’s not our main contention, nor our focus of this review.

What kind of the policeman is this Durai Singam? We were told he is honest. We would have believed it even if we were not told because he is the ‘hero’. I invite readers to observe my conscious use of the word ‘hero’ and not protagonist which is my usual preferred choice. When Singam hears that a girl is being ‘eve teased’ and subsequently harassed by a group of thugs in a cinema hall he gets incredibly enraged. So much so that he takes out his motorcycle (with the girl in the pillion, of course), personally visits the cinema hall and beats up the gang to no ends. There’s a curious aspect to this scene. Before he begins to bash up, he challenges them to show up (because out of fear they hide behind the rest of the cinema going public). One of the thugs shout from behind the crowd that they will show up only if the SI can lay his gun aside. The SI, valiantly, unfastens his gun and hands it over to the harassed girl. Now he is ready to face them.

What were they worried about? That the SI would shoot them? And for what crime - eve-teasing? Technically no police inspector can use a firearm without an order from the collector. Not least on eve-teasers, with or without collector’s orders. Then in a fight scene that ensues, Singam beats up each one of the guys in front of the cinema hall with full crowd watching. The crowd too watches the action nonchalantly. After the fight is over, one woman in the crowd evidently remarks, ‘These guys should have known what would happen if they played foul with a policeman’s wife.’ What would happen if they played foul with an ordinary man’s wife is not explained.
Have our people been so desensitised enough to not understand the apparent absurdity of the action? Or because of the constant behaviour of our callous, corrupt, and increasingly violent police, have our public come believe that the job of a police officer is to beat up bad guys? And ‘bad guys’ according to whose belief? What would our public do if another officer decides to beat up a ‘good guy’ because the ‘good guy’ was being a thorn in the police officer’s fraudulent flesh? How many movies have we seen where the ‘hero’ is not a police officer but an ordinary civilian who gets arrested and beaten up by the corrupt police officers in collusion with the equally corrupt politicians?

Even in this movie, the ‘honest’ police officer Singam fabricates charges on the guys who frustrate him. He sets up a trap for the gangster’s brother and murders him (for a good measure Singam calls up the gangster and puts the phone on loudspeaker so that he could hear the raining bullet shots). Later, the honest inspector arrests the police commissioner who was found assisting the gangster and later releases him stating a strange kind of logic that if the press gets to know of his arrest, it would sully the reputation of the police department.

The police department is being repeatedly portrayed in two extremes in our films. They are corrupt, merciless and violent or honest, intelligent and straightforward. The former are villains and the later are heroes. In both cases they are aggressive and violent. When the villain policemen are shown to be violent it is seen as horrid because the violence is usually aimed at good guys. But when the hero policemen are shown to be violent it is celebrated because the violence is shown to be aimed at bad guys. The violence in itself is not scorned at and the conviction that policemen are violent is not questioned. In a way, again in a crude sense of logic, we can’t find fault with the director because he was indeed portraying what we see in everyday life. The trouble arises only when the film appears to celebrate it. Policemen violating the law or turning violent is bad for the society. That it is indeed being violated by a good cop is no excuse. Films like Singam that glorifies police violence does much more harm to police department than films that portray them as villains or buffoons.