Director: Venkat Prabhu
Writers: Venkat Prabhu, Ezhilarasu Gunasekaran, K. Chandru, Manivannan, Balasubramaniyam
Stars: Vijay, Prashanth, Mohan
Synopsis: Gandhi is a hostage negotiator, field agent, and spy working for the Special Anti-Terrorist Squad (SATS). After years of service, he is called back for a critical mission that sets him on a dangerous collision course with his own past.
Thalapathy Vijay is The Greatest of All Time. That’s what Yuvan Shekhar Raja’s bludgeoning music keeps telling us for 183 excruciating minutes in the alleged GOAT’s penultimate motion picture before he makes his full entry into politics. In February 2024, Vijay, to the shock of many, announced his retirement from acting after a successful career since his beginnings as a child actor through his father S.A. Chandrasekhar’s films to focus on his political involvement.
Vijay has become a household name in Tamil cinema, and one of its biggest stars. He has frequently collaborated with Atlee in Theri, Mersal, and Bigil, and achieved the most significant success of his career with Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Master and Leo. The latter is arguably his best work to date, a cold and calculating character-driven study on how the flames of violence are never truly extinguished when a person is born and raised out of violence.
With The Greatest of All Time, Venkat Prabhu seems to want to tip the hat for such an illustrious career, always showing him recreating famous moments from his career, such as the chewing gum eating move in Atlee’s Theri. Prabhu even goes all out and makes him imitate Shah Rukh Khan’s signature open-arms pose he puts in most of his films, which prompted me to yell “How dare you stand where he stood?”. There’s only one GOAT, and Vijay ain’t it.
But I digress. In my opinion, the most important element that indicates whether or not an Indian film will be good is how a filmmaker introduces his lead star. There’s an art to the buildup and catharsis one gets when they see their favorite star on screen for the first time, especially when one will spend three hours with them.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t help that the action scene surrounding Vijay’s introductory appearance in The Greatest of All Time is clunky, loud, and overedited. Of course, overediting is par for the course with many Indian films (see the nauseating work of Prashanth Neel), but Prabhu and editor Venkat Raajen use quick, jarring jump-cuts within a tight setting to hide the poor, unplanned stunt work on display. We can’t see anything occurring on screen, which dilutes any emotional or cinematic impact they would otherwise have.
As a result, the violence never feels cathartic, or cinematically exhilarating, which were on full display in Lokesh’s Leo. Unlike that movie, Prabhu has no sense of space, and doesn’t know where to position the camera during what looks to be a massive set piece. Looks to be, because it’s hard to discern what’s being shown to us on screen. The only action sequence with sauce occurs before its intermission, set in a moving subway train, where Gandhi (Vijay) fights against a masked antagonist in a tight, quasi-claustrophobic setting.
Shoddy VFX aside, the action sequence is competently shot, staged, and scored (as if Loki himself ghost-directed it), but it’s the only sequence in the movie that’s worth a damn. Vijay seems intent to play with his face in the movie, particularly in its aforementioned introduction scene. His body is fully visible, and his signature poses are immediately setting the stage for a killer introduction, a powerful reveal for Vijay unlike any other. However, his face is instead digitally altered to resemble the late actor/politician Vijaykanth, who passed away in December of last year.
Some will say this AI-generated tribute mirrors Thalapathy’s current political trajectory, but it’s another garish example of digital necromancy that should never, in any circumstance, be treated on screen. This coming incredibly close after the controversy surrounding Ian Holm’s appearance in Alien: Romulus is even more galling. Yes, even if his family agreed, the person who gets resurrected for our apparent entertainment did not, and cannot approve of this, because they are no longer with us. Instead of satisfyingly giving Vijay one penultimate intro to remember (though his iconic animated title card still gets you pumped the hell up), this soulless reanimated corpse leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
But this is Prabhu’s big technological approach for The Greatest of All Time: pit the 50-year-old Vijay with a ‘younger’, de-aged version of himself, utilizing Artificial Intelligence to make his son, Jeevan (also played by Vijay) twenty years younger than the current-day Thalapathy. The results are hit-or-miss, but perhaps it’s because the lead actor doesn’t look a day over 35 that it looks competent. But there are also sequences in which the de-aging is so bad it almost looks like a cutscene straight out of a mid-tier Call of Duty installment, particularly in its ridiculous twist ending that suddenly makes the entire three-hour actioner a knockoff of Ang Lee’s equally terrible Gemini Man.
Gandhi is a spy working for the Special Anti-Terrorist Squad (SATS), and is so good at his job that people (and its BGM) constantly praise him as one of the greatest field agents SATS ever had. And yet, with so many incredible skills as a spy, he’s an absolutely terrible parent, leaving Jeevan alone in the hospital unattended as her wife (Sneha) is undergoing labor. You would think that The Greatest of All Time would know how to parent, but apparently not!
The ‘smartest’ and ‘greatest’ characters in the film constantly make nonsensical decisions like these throughout its runtime, which leads into his son getting (predictably) kidnapped and seemingly dying in an accident where he gets horribly burned to death. This shockingly exploitative scene, in which we directly see the burnt corpses being pulled out of the van, are exacerbated by Vijay’s caricatural cries. It gets even worse when he returns to the hospital to share the devastating news with his wife, as they hold their newborn child in agony. Repulsive doesn’t even begin to describe how shamelessly manipulative this whole sequence is.
Many years pass, and Gandhi is now on assignment in Russia. A terrorist attack occurs while he is in his office, leading him to be confronted by a person who looks exactly like him. Surprise, surprise, it’s Jeevan, and he can’t believe his son has been alive all this time without him knowing. We’ll eventually find out how he survived, which makes sense in the context of the main antagonist’s plan, but gets far more shockingly exploitative when Prabhu presents an extended flashback in which Jeevan was a victim of child trafficking. This entire dramatic crux is terribly icky, but is constantly reminded to us as any emotional beat is developed between father and son. The two get chased by a group of terrorists, fly back to India, and reconcile with Gandhi’s wife. This all seems too good to be true, and it is, soon pitting a rivalry between father and son, after the latter was brainwashed by terrorist leader Rajiv Menon (Mohan) to do his bidding.
Yet, even with so many maze-like twists and turns, there are very few surprises in The Greatest of All Time. One is always thirteen steps ahead of the screenplay, no matter how it tries to subvert expectations at every turn with elongated flashbacks and uber-dramatic reveals, always intensified through a bulldozing score so deafening the cinema had to pause the movie and lower the volume in the wake of several audience complaints. This gets even worse when, instead of naturally building towards emotional catharsis, Prabhu constantly manipulates its characters into cruel sequences that are always of their own inane decisions, even if they are known to be incredibly smart operatives. I’m beginning to think they’re not very good at their job, and at their personal lives!
Everything in The Greatest of All Time is designed to be as much in-your-face as possible. Yet, when the technical aspects of the movie are risible at best, distasteful at worst, the action sequences are haphazardly shot (it’s incredible how it manages to overexpose and underlight the camera at the same time, something Uwe Boll can’t even accomplish!) and incomprehensibly edited. In many cases with Indian films, the derring-do is enough for me to appreciate the movie, and I had hoped it would at least be competently filmed, and aesthetically pleasing. But there isn’t a single moment (barring the subway fight) that made me want to sit through three hours of Vijay always overexaggerating every single aspect of his performance.
Gone is the emotional complexity he brought in his thrilling shift as Parthiban/Leo Das in Kanagaraj’s Leo, or the romantic, almost God-like charm he operates within Atlee’s unofficial Vijay trilogy. We instead have two turns that always try too much at every single occasion. There are no subdued emotions, no feelings that were boiled down and ‘snap’ back up in an intense jolt of violence. It’s always, ‘how can I put everything, all at once, in front of the audience?’ Suffice it to say, it’s embarrassing, and is arguably one of Vijay’s most disappointing performances. When he yells “DO YOU THINK YOU CAN STOP ME? DO YOU THINK YOU CAN STOP ME? NO ONE CAN STOP ME!” with as much cartoonish energy as Eddie Redmayne repeating “I can’t” and hyperventilating in The Good Nurse, one wonders if he ever seriously studied the artform of acting at all before getting into movies.When guided by a great filmmaker, Vijay is usually quite compelling. But when directed by someone who doesn’t even know what his movie is supposed to be (a family drama? Spy thriller? The start of an ambitious sci-fi universe? Foiling a terrorist plot?), or how his actors should react to anything occurring on screen, he’s obviously going to falter.
If he truly were the GOAT, he’d deliver an amazing performance every time, just like SRK does in Bollywood, or even, if we’re staying in Kollywood, Rajinikanth. He starred in plenty of lousy stuff, especially recently. He is never bad in anything he’s in. Maybe Thalapathy should take inspiration from him going into his final film because The Greatest of All Time is definitely not what its title suggests.
