Leo review: Thalapathy Vijay is likeable in this Lokesh Kanagaraj film that flatters to deceive

Thalapathy Vijay in a still from Lokesh Kanagaraj's latest film, Leo.

In a scene from Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Leo, our protagonist is faced with unwanted guests at his café. He offers money, politely asks them to walk away but pushed, he implodes with visually startling specificity. The punches find their jaws as gobsmacked faces look on in stark horror. It comes out of nowhere, and yet you could see the ultra-violent sequence coming. Parthi (Vijay) drops to his knees and weeps uncontrollably after getting a moment to collect his breath. It’s an impressively choreographed action sequence that culminates in a syntactic shift. From here on in everything is blast or bombast. It’s a scene that underlines Kanagaraj’s ability to assort immaculate action sequences with Anirudh’s music as the ingredient and a star’s mass appeal as the fiery catalyst. Unfortunately, it’s also a sequence that undresses the rest of the film as a despairingly dull grind.

Thalapathy Vijay stars as Parthi the soft-spoken, innocent café owner in Theog, Himachal Pradesh. The film has obviously been shot in a snowy Kashmir, and makes little effort to accommodate local cultures into its vocabulary. Parthi is the doting father of a teenage son a younger daughter, and the loving husband of Sathya (Trisha Krishnan). Our bearded, ageing, but reclusively virile protagonist has a somewhat unreliable history. History that gets exhumed in dazzlingly violent fashion as Parthi decapitates local goons while trying to defend his family. As news of his reluctant heroism spreads mobsters from faraway lands converge on the small town, claiming he is actually Leo Das, the rowdy son of druglord Antony Das (Sanjay Dutt) and nephew of Harold Das, played by a menacing Arjun Sarja.

Loosely translated from David Cronenberg’s masterful A History of Violence (acknowledged in the credits), Vijay is cast perfectly as Parthi. He is straight-faced in a way that allows the story to happen to him in a role where he ably balances duplicity of violent roots alongside paranoia about impending doom. Every time the film folds into its own rhythm, musical numbers are recalled from the Director’s filmography, and hats are tipped to the interconnected cinematic universe he is trying to build ever since his previous film’s (Vikram, 2022) success. The script stutters, especially with an introductory sequence that sees Parthi combat a wild hyena — as authorities look on mind you — to then return to his humble place behind the counter of a café. It screams oomph, but also translates to a narrative gaffe by demanding a man to fit the pants of a functional recluse and a hidden predator at once. When that shift in tone arrives, it feels predictably dulling rather than edge-of-the-seat explosive.

Unsurprisingly, the best moments of this meandering film are the ones that remind you of Vikram. None of that moody, indie sensibility translates to Leo, despite a geographical setting that offers curbs on landscape, scale and spectacle. In a terrific sequence that plays out in a police station a local officer reminds Parthi of his ordinariness, to which he reacts with unspecific fury and rage. Unfortunately, this thread of a nobody fighting against the world is abandoned for the more flamboyant stuff. Just what does the film gain or borrow from its icy setting is never really explored. If nothing else, it illustrates Vijay’s affability, and possibly versatility, as the perfect shade to a lesser-known violent self. Another problem with the film is the token bad guys who behave like syrupy tin cans overflowing with shrill machismo. The blood, the gore is reminiscent of dust-gathering manuals from films of similar ilk, but even the climactic choreography of it all feels a bit jaded. None of the female characters get any purchase from this indignantly robust film.

Moreover, even the Kanagaraj flashback — so effective in Vikram — falls flat in the face colliding arcs of violence and the humanity conflicted men seek through it. Sure it’s stylish, well-dressed as most set-pieces in a Kanagaraj film are, but they do little to elevate a story that by the end is cornered into sustaining on wave after wave of hollow, caricatured visual flourishes.

For all the dizzying, measured promise of Vikram, Leo feels like a dulled, discoloured spectacle. It has familiar highs, predictive non-twists and crowd-pleasing cameos but little of the former’s ingenuity and elegance. Vijay does fine, maybe even saves the film from sliding downhill but there are signs of creative swagger meeting hubris here. In a sequence that must convey Parthi’s trauma, in the aftermath of a night of gory violence, we hear a gothic-voiced, punk track that slithers into the chorus ‘I’m shit scared of that.’ It’s one thing to build your cinema around testosterone it’s another to, even in moments of cautiously drilled calm, rub the sack in the viewer’s face. Excess can’t always fill in for everything and even though there is plenty to enjoy about it here, you’d wish for something more humble the next time round.

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