If we set aside blind hero-worship for this Tamil film’s male lead, ‘Good Bad Ugly’ exposes itself for what it is: a weak-kneed embarrassing attempt to play up Ajith Kumar’s superstardom.
Even an unabashed hagiography needs some kind of quality protection against the rush of gush. This Tamil film is like termite-infested wooden furniture, more suited for the kabadiwala than the museum.
Whoever wrote this junkfood for the fans of Ajith Kumar has done the Superstar (and his followers) a huge disservice. Everything in the plot (there are as many as seven screenplay writers) seems designed to give the hero a slippery banana peel kind of appeal. At the start, when AK (that’s, ahem, Ajith Kumar for you) is shown dancing in the prison with all the inmates joining in (there are no prison rules applicable to our superhero), Ajith’s dance steps seem borrowed from Govinda’s unreleased footage in the cans.
Neither the corny choreography nor the helium of hagiography does anything for our superstar’s image. The rest of the plot seems to have written itself out while the crew was out looking for more ways to make the leading man look undignified.
Somewhere tucked into the mounds of messy mayhem (machine guns get a special position of power in the rudderless plot) is a family story about a retired gangster (gangsters retire in our cinema, superstars don’t) who must return to crime to protect his family.
The young actor chosen to play AK’s son Vihaan (Karthikeya Dev) is consciously callow, to constantly remind the audience that he needs protection. With evergreen Papa on the prowl, the 18-year-old baby boy has nothing to fear, except maybe oafishly written prison sequences.
AK’s prison visit to comfort his son ranks as a toolkit of booboo-ism. “Don’t worry, I will have you out in a year or so,” the powerful father tells his son. Is this the time to joke? Or, hang on, was Daddy being practical?
I suspect AK, also known among friends and enemies as, hold your breath, Red Dragon, actually wanted an excuse to get back into business. Once you have tasted blood, why would you want to lead a sedentary white-collar life with mush replacing machine guns? Ask Manoj Bajpayee about it.
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Unlike The Family Man, which makes the hero’s secret life seem inevitable, the exigencies simulated in Good Bad Ugly seem so strenuous that every over-burdened sequence feels like a weapon of mass destruction designed to peel off some edge from the Superstar’s image.
A pity, as Ajith deserves a lot better. And he did get a halfway decent thriller in his last outing, Vidaamuyarchi. In that, Ajith’s co-star Trisha was largely missing as she was kidnapped. In ‘Good Bad Ugly’, Trisha is missing anyway. Just one of those things that happen in our patriarchal films.
