Vikram movie review: Lokesh Kanagaraj’s enormous fanboy service to Kamal Haasan is extremely satisfying

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Vikram movie review: Kamal Haasan reprises his role as a spy named Vikram from the first movie that came out in 1986. The film, however, is set in a background that has connections with the events that took place in Lokesh’s career-making movie Kaithi (2019).

Tamil superstar Kamal Haasan has returned to big-screen entertainment after a gap of four years. While he was active publicly as a TV host and the leader of a political party, he couldn’t have asked for a better comeback than Vikram, which is written and directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj.

Kamal and Lokesh kept telling us that there was no connection between Vikram that came out in 1986, and the new iteration. But that is only a half-truth. Lokesh, like his other films, lifts material from the cinematic well of Kamal, and reinvents it to suit the taste of the current crop of the movie-going audience. The spark for the latest Vikram came from Kamal himself. When Lokesh approached the actor to pitch a movie to him, the latter spoke of a plot idea that he had originally thought of for the 1986 movie. But, at that time, director Rajasekhar had felt the story idea was way ahead of its time and zeroed in on a different premise about an off-duty spy, who ends up preventing an airborne attack. That Vikram was Kamal’s attempt to make a Bond-like movie in Tamil, while this Vikram is very rooted in terms of culture and in the context of social and relationships, far removed from the world of Bond.

Left to Kamal, he couldn’t have made the latest Vikram this good. He could perhaps have made a movie better than this version about a rogue agent going on a killing spree on a personal mission. But, that movie wouldn’t have been this enjoyable. He would have added layers upon layers to the narration, and engineered some quiet, character-building moments, giving the film an intellectual heft. Lokesh, on the other hand, keeps this film very light on the mind and eyes. The narration is fluid and nimble, replete with a plethora of fanboy moments.