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

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.