Release
date:
|
Kerala: August 8, 2019
Delhi: August 9,
2019
|
Director:
|
Praveen Prabharam
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Tovino Thomas,
Samyuktha Menon, Saiju Kurup, Hareesh Uthaman, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Shivajith Padmanabhan
Malayalam
|
As if it isn’t heartbreaking
enough that Nivin Pauly did that obnoxious film Mikhael this year, Tovino Thomas goes and does this one.
To be fair, Mikhael’s
loudness is child’s play in comparison with Kalki’s
repugnant celebration of extreme violence. This is a film that uses crushed
bones, twisted joints and sliced off body parts as a tool for both humour and
moralising, in what must rank as one of the most disgusting cinematic odes to
bloodshed ever seen.
Imagine what Kalki must be if one of the dominant
motifs in its sound design is the gurgling and bubbling of blood just as it
begins to pour out of bodies ripped
apart by various characters including the ‘hero’.
Imagine this
moment, designed as comedy, when a policeman with a sobre demeanour carries a
blood-spattered chainsaw to this ‘hero’, explains that one of the villain’s
legs has now been cut off and asks permission to cut off the second leg too
since they are paying rent for the tool anyway. The boss gives his assent.
If that ‘hero’ had
been played by Mammootty or Mohanlal, perhaps one could live with it. After
all, the two M’s have allowed their careers to rest largely on ugly machismo
and physical invincibility in the past couple of decades. The disappointment
here arises from the fact that the protagonist is young Tovino Thomas whose
stardom has been built primarily with thoughtful films like Godha, Mayaanadhi, Virus and Luca.
In a town called
Nanchenkotta in Kalki, an upright
policeman called Vyshakhan commits suicide, unable to take the humiliation meted
out by the criminal overlord Amarnath and his flunkeys who rule the region.
Amarnath has ties to the senior politician Vijayanandhan whose extremist party
DYP has driven out the Tamils in the area. With elections approaching and
alliances being sewed up, all lines are crossed until a new S.I. takes
Vyshakhan’s seat. Played by Thomas, this policeman remains unnamed till the
end, identified simply as K on his badge and nameplate and as Kalki by the
soundtrack.
You get an idea of
where this film is headed in his introductory scene when he sets a hooligan on
fire while a signature song is screeched out in the background. This is the
sort of raucous number packed with silly English lines that a certain kind of Malayalam filmmaker seems to think is
a signifier of super coolth.
Like Mikhael’s laughable referencing of
Christian mythology, Kalki too takes
a shot at intellectualism. So of course the title comes from the name of the
tenth and final avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu: the swordsman Kalki who is
expected to descend on the world to end Kalyug, a dismal, destructive phase of
human existence. There is potential for such great storytelling with a
modern-day interpretation of Kalki, but writer-director Praveen Prabharam (who
has co-written this film with Sujin Sujathan) is not one for nuance and deep
thought. And so his Kalki is so bloody and lawless that the only distinction
between Amarnath’s gang and him is that he stands with a marginalised people,
the laudable ends being offered as justification for his condemnable means. If
cinema reflects reality, then Kalki
is a reflection of a real-life Kalyug that upholds a 56-inch male chest as a
virtue.
In one scene, K
virtually lists as a plus point in his favour the fact that he is in the home
of one of his enemies but has not raped the women of the family. This is
Prabharam’s version of Ishq’s
horrifying second half.
As is the case with
male actors in all such Malayalam films, Tovino Thomas deadpans and poses
around throughout Kalki. So do all
the men playing the antagonists. The only actor who gets something out of this
script is Saiju Kurup in the role of an idealist.
The lovely
Samyuktha Menon has not much to do here. She appears to have been cast in the
role of K’s bete noir’s daughter only because her pairing with Thomas in Theevandi drew acclaim. From the little
that we see of her Dr Sangeetha, she seems like a feisty creature, but we get
to see so little. The women of this film are mere sidelights in a man’s world.
Everyone in Kalki is relegated to the background as K / Thomas strides across the screen framed in stereotypical low-angle
shots, playing with his Ray-Bans, the earth stopping to listen to the crunching
sound of his slippers touching the ground, all while ear-splitting music
overwhelms the narrative.
Even K is not the
central figure of this film though. The central figure is DoP Gautham Sankar
who captures in excruciating detail Amarnath stabbing his first victim and
ripping his torso by dragging the dagger all the way down to the stomach in an
action that we soon discover is his MO, a meat cleaver severing a man’s nose, a
head being smashed against a metal pillar, and more.
You too, Tovino
Thomas?
Rating (out
of five stars): 1/4
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
Running time:
|
141 minutes
|
This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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