(Spoilers ahead)
Sivakarthikeyan doesn’t have to dream to do a film with director Shankar someday. With Hero , directed by P.S. Mithran, he seems to have done exactly that.
The protagonist is Shakti (Sivakarthikeyan), who grows up idolising television superhero Shaktimaan. When his teacher asks him what he wants to become in life, he says, “Shaktimaan. And help those in need.” A little later, someone even comments, “To change this system, a gentleman won’t do. A superhero is what we need.” There’s extra stress on the word Gentleman (remember the 1993 vigilante film starring Arjun?) and for a good reason.
With Hero , Mithran — who gave us a good thriller in Irumbu Thirai last year — liberally borrows cinematic tropes that we would generally associate with Shankar, but still manages to give us a heady mix of action and thrills that keeps us engaged. The story’s theme could be summed up in two words: dream big (there’s even an Abdul Kalam photo in a newspaper somewhere), but to the makers’ credit, the drama surrounding the protagonist is weaved in with intelligence.
- Director: PS Mithran
- Cast: Sivakarthikeyan, Kalyani, Arjun, Abhay Deol
- Storyline: An ordinary man decides to get rid of the ills that plague our educational system
Shakti runs a printing press, but one with a difference — it prints fake certificates so that people struggling to get jobs can get one. All goes well, and Sivakarthikeyan does Sivakarthikeyan things (read: be goofy) with friends and a love interest (played by Kalyani Priyadarshan; this is her debut in Tamil cinema), till it reaches a point when Shakti has to do something he has never done before: help a student get admission into a prestigious institution without resorting to devious means.
He fails, and that really kickstarts proceedings in Hero . With Arjun playing a key role as mentor and a few child artistes (Ivana as Madhi does a splendid job) being thrown in to the mix, Hero throws up some interesting moments with purpose. Sivakarthikeyan’s printing press experience comes in handy much later in the film in a whistle-worthy sequence. A child innovator’s invention helps the protagonist greatly. Necessity is the mother of invention, goes the popular adage. Hero proves it.
With so much focus on the hero, the villain does take a backseat — Abhay Deol’s character could have been fleshed out a lot more. The Bollywood actor looks the part and has made an effort in Tamil dialogue delivery, but the character is one-dimensional (a clichéd education-corporate honcho). Every villain we’ve had in Tamil cinema eliminates threats, but here’s someone who thwarts even the idea of threat. Also, his main grouse that innovations pose a threat to corporate dreams is incredulous; why can’t India, a country with such a large population, accommodate both streams of thought?
Hero is about the mainstream versus the alternative, about what education teaches us and what it ought to, but you wish it didn’t have to hammer that point in every single scene. A lawyer, who has no real link to the larger scheme of things, bemoans about how it is very easy to “buy” lawyers and judges. A hospital administrator, another person who has no real connection to the main storyline, comments that he is more concerned about “100% result” of his institution rather than caring for a patient.
There’s an entire stretch over a students’ rough notebooks that will surely become a point of discussion among audiences. If one were to go over director Mithran’s notebook, there would probably be sketches of camera and lights and everything you would associate with a film set. And somewhere in that book would also be stills from director Shankar’s earlier works.
