Guess who is smarter than your smartphone? It is Rajinikanth
Chennai is under attack. Every cellphone has flown from hands and vanished into the sky, leaving scientists befuddled. I found one floated theory particularly interesting: what if this is a rival cellular phone company trying to establish itself? Considering the way a certain service provider has busted the kneecaps of the competition with savagely predatory pricing, I wondered if this film’s big baddie was a stand-in for one of India’s megacorps.
No dice. Director
Shankar always has wellmeaning ideas at the core, but his cinema flirts with relevance instead of committing to it. The 2010 Enthiran (Robot) was Frankenstein by way of artificial intelligence, told in a flimsy manner. But what Shankar cracked there was a way forward for a mythically outsized leading man: Rajinikanth played the mild-mannered scientist Vasigaran, with all the punches and punchlines saved for Chitti the Robot, his superhuman alter-ego.
In the sequel, 2.0, the battle has potential: Rajinikanth versus the phones that give him the power he holds, via memes and ringtones and hashtags.
Except that the villain here is a birdbrain: an ornithologist who, angered by the injustice we do to birds with the radiation from our cellphone towers, uses thousands of disembodied cellphones to create an… angry bird.
“Nice DP,” says Chitti, when he comes face to face with the villain, unsubtly named Pakshiraja, and played by Akshay Kumar. It is the right response, for Kumar, despite his vast (and undefined) powers, never feels like a serious threat.
Shankar is all about spectacle and this 3D movie doesn’t disappoint in that respect. If anything, the director is over-eager and we’re ducking to avoid the many, many objects being hurled at us.
Rajini is in screen-dominating form, though, both as the efficient Vasigaran and as Chitti.
Enthiran provided memorable visuals of interlocked Rajinikanths; 2.0 does that in 3D.
Shankar provides some clever asides here too, both visual and verbal: a window-washer startled by the giant bird monster, or the act of queuing to buy cellphones described as a pilgrimage.
This balance is lost in the unending climax.
In one sequence that you will never be able to un-see, Rajini enters Kumar.
Elsewhere, other things meld together into bigger, more unwieldy things. Shankar’s perpetual game of Lego turns even Chitti magnetic, covering him in all sorts of metallic garbage like a Subodh Gupta installation.
Also, the hero threatens the villain by holding pigeons hostage and threatening to snap their necks. Go figure.
Actually, don’t. Despite that tedious climax, 2.0 is a blast. It could have been a smarter film, but this is a fun Rajinikanth ride, with solid 3D and great Atmos sound. Shankar sticks to the plot, never slows down, with no time for melodrama or song sequences.
Kumar has fun snarling and cawing and Jackson is good in a quirky role. But a Rajini film is only about one man.
Now if only he could stop our calls from dropping.