The big Tamil hit of the season, Naanum Rowdydhaan (I’m a Rowdy Too), opens with a small but crystallising image. A seven-year-old boy, Pondy, sits in an empty cell in the police station where his mother works as an inspector, assiduously filling in a school worksheet. Under the question “What do you want to be?”, the boy pencils the word “police”, but upon hearing a crime story told by the excitable rogue who takes his place in the cell, he alters the letters to read “rowdy” (ie, thug). With appreciable economy, writer-director Vignesh Shivan establishes his own ambition: to make merry mischief on either side of the fine line between law and disorder.
Fast-forward 20 years, and Pondy (Vijay Sethupathi) has set up shop as a strongman for hire, his prices set out in garish DayGlo on the walls of his underpopulated office: 10,000 rupees for leg-breaking, 15,000 for an arm. When he crosses paths with a spirited deaf woman, Kadhambari (Nayanthara), the film wobbles on the edge of sappiness, but Shivan is explicit in describing the effect she has on our hero: Pondy is obliged to speak slower and softer, to use his hands to communicate rather than throw punches. I had fond flashbacks to 2006’s Lage Raho Munna Bhai, in which a mobster found himself mollified by the pestering spirit of Gandhi.
After several weeks of Hindi movies trading in random gags and clashing tones, it’s a relief to encounter a film in which every element feels integrated and thought through: Kadhambari’s deafness connects to that prologue as well as the subsequent murder of her father. Even the musical numbers – all but one penned by Shivan – serve to push the plot on, or strengthen our sense of these characters; as the title song says of Pondy: “He doesn’t like violence / But he’s a rowdy anyway.” It therefore makes sense when we arrive at a point, just before the intermission, where gentle Kadhambari turns Lady Macbeth and asks Pondy to help her slay her father’s killer.
This development instantly relieves Nayanthara of having to play a damp-eyed damsel-in-distress; just as Pondy is evidently less of a tough guy than he’d like to project, so Kadhambari proves far steelier than first assumed. A US remake would have to pair, say, Seth Rogen with Angelina Jolie: we’d immediately grasp he’d do anything for her, while fearing his heart might give out in the process. The second half, essentially a man-on-a-mission movie, makes pointed the fact that the pair’s target (Parthiban, shrewdly pantomimic) is now standing for office – again, it’s a fine line – and funny the idea that he has upset so many folk, he is tailed by rival assassins.
There are some rough edges and missed opportunities. Overbearing incidental music keeps threatening to drown out the dialogue, and Shivan doesn’t quite make enough of his fine supporting cast. (One key player vanishes for so long that the end credits joke about their disappearance.) Still, the narrative assurance is matched by a breeziness of tone. You feel everybody relaxing around the coastal Pondicherry locations; wherever queasy violence lurks, Shivan knows a good gag will leaven the mood. Unlike its protagonist, his film isn’t pretending to be anything other than what it is: far from a novelty, but well written, carefully composed and very likably played – the kind of crowdpleaser that deserves its success.