In Ranjiy Jeyakodi’s hard-hitting fast-paced stunningly mounted action thriller Michael you won’t come across a single dull moment. The pace is relentlessly breakneck and shatter-jaw, and just when you think it’s going to collapse under the pressures of performance anxiety, the momentum grows again. Quite like sex in a storm.
In its absolute absence of inertia, Michael is next to none. It stands out as one of the most compelling products of the kitsch factory in a long time. The screenplay by Jaykodi pays a frenetic homage to Bollywood of the 1970s: there is a glowering hero Sundeep Kishan suitably beefed up and hardly in a mood to talk, his only mission in life is to seek revenge on the man who has wronged his mother.
Remember Amitabh Bachchan battling with Sanjeev Kumar for his mother Waheeda Rehman in Yash Chopra’s Trishul?
There is a primeval quality to the pitched battles in Michael, a swooning desperation captured in action pieces that are prolonged painful and often syncopated. Indeed while the surface tension is frequently visceral and raw — and hats off to editor R Sathyanarayan for treating time as putty in the hands of the pulsating plot — the subliminal layer secrets a sort of dread-filled karma that tells us every character in the film is doomed. Or close.
Strangely, the basic plotline and the characters are borderline trite. And yet they manage to rise far above the mundane by stoking the fires that light up the vendetta trail. From the beginning to the end, there is constantly an inherent tension in the storytelling which stops for a breather only when the hero falls in love.
This is where the problem starts. Once Michael meets Theera (Divyansha Kaushik) there is a pause, albeit minor. Michael is uncharacteristically smitten as Theera plays the preening kitten mouthing corny throwaway lines that sound more ripped off than written, and getting away with it. Divyansha is fascinating in her body language and her character’s supreme need for spewing virginal seduction. In the second half, she is reduced to a cowering whimpering bundle of nerves as the men do what they have to do.
Nonetheless, for an action film, Michael finds ample room for the women to bloom. Anusaya Bhardwaj as the archvillain Gautham Menon’s borderline psychotic wife overdoes it. But Varalaxmi Sarathkumar as Vijay Sethupathi’s gun-toting grenade-hurling comrade in arms is an irresistibly sexy vixen in a saree. Varalaxmi is my favourite character and performance in a film brimming and ricocheting with rugged splendour.
The Vijay Sethupathi episode in the plot is a whammy. He is a cigar-smoking hothouse of righteous violence. And I must say Sethupathi smokes the cigar much more elegantly than Sushmita Sen.
With hardly a superfluous episode in its entire bristling landscape, Michael is a remarkably conceived actioner with no room for a creative stasis. It may not seem like a huge achievement as it unleashes emotional and visual energy taken from the cinema of the 1970s and 80s. But if we foolishly dismiss Michael as “a poor mimicry of KGF” then we are guilty of mistaking a homage to the era of potboilers as a potboiler.
I have seldom seen a film so tonally alert and so flush with the colours of vendetta and doom. The cinematography by first-timer Kiran Koushik is on a par with the sanguinary scenario created by cinematographer Gordon Willis in The Godfather and PC Sreeram in Nayakan.
One cinema illiterate critic has commented that every frame in Michael looks like a painting. This kind of naïve description reduces the great visuals to a museum-like frigidity. In truth, most frames of Michael speak to us, prod and tease us into believing that cinema still has the power to transport us into a universe where violence is not only about blood and the bloodline. It is also about how we look at crime and punishment in modern times.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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