The opening sequence of RJ Balaji’s Karuppu is all sparks and embers in a bichrome backdrop of red and black. It’s a nightmare in which a man gets assaulted by unknown assailants and a majestic rageful God descends to save him. The man, played by Indrans, jolts up in a train and looks at his daughter Binu (Anagha Ravi). The Malayali father and daughter are in Chennai for Binu’s surgery and are soon mugged on the road and stripped of their mode of payment for her treatment—jewelry. After this clear establishment of geography, Karuppu eschews all locational specifics to build a world where folk mythology clashes with a land of comical lawlessness. Only we aren’t sure if the exaggeration is intentional or otherwise.
Balaji and his co-writers (Ashwin Ravichandran, Rahul Raj, TS Gopi Krishnan, Karan Aravind Kumar) build an artificial structure where judiciary is run like mafia. Lawyers operate a thuggish syndicate where they bribe judges to get judgements in their favor and threaten other lawyers to drop cases. Within minutes, they organize whole cartels to humiliate police officers if they so much as question them on procedure. Baby Kannan (RJ Balaji) is one such lawyer, the judge and the court at his feet, exploiting his clients as much as he does the system. He makes dramatic challenges on the court premises (or wherever they all go for lunch), throwing case papers on the ground and asking if there's any lawyer who'd dare appear against him. Binu and her father, trying to recover their gold, get tangled in this world.
Maybe we can buy Balaji’s preposterous setting, but the execution is painfully mediocre. He can't think beyond the level of YouTube skits; the courts look like sets of amateur theatre productions with loud actors. The climax is during an ‘inauguration’ of a newly built court, and it looks more like a film launch event. If this was a straight spoof, it would've been more fitting, but this is a film that also wants us to feel for Binu and her father, and hundreds of others waiting for justice. Its promise of a God in the court of law is short lived; Suriya as lawyer Saravanan uses his superpowers to show off and is soon told that he cannot invoke his heavenly skills to mete out justice. Balaji never follows through on this, falling back on tired tropes: an emotional scene followed by Suriya dispatching a few men or referencing his own films.
The curse of the references sinks Karuppu too. Balaji tips his hat to Vijay, Ajith, Better Call Saul, Kantara. There is a childish recreation of a scene from Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Leo that reveals the hollowness of this whole enterprise. The action lacks vigour, its visuals hastily sliced and presented. There is a not-half-bad idea of the god’s powers restricted by jurisdiction, much like lawmen, but the film extends this only to one set piece.
Karuppu is a mangled mess which looks like it's been put together with disparate parts in the editing room. In the initial portions, the lip movements of Saravanan's fellow lawyer Preethi (Trisha Krishnan) don’t match the dialogue. We then see the same pattern for several other actors. The cuts are frantic even in conversation scenes, as if master shots and coverage were used to give the scenes a semblance of coherence. It’s the same case with music director Sai Abhyankkar. If Balaji’s work is all scrambled, Abhyankkar’s is a jangle of instruments with undecipherable lyrics and unharmonious tones. The score envelopes words in the songs and clouds the action with discordant notes. Tamil cinema has now made this a habit, assembly line mass cinema where dense structure supersedes ideas.
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