The seasoned filmmaker plays with his trademarks in an attempt to create a new kind of love story. The execution, though, is inauthentic and lazy
Action has always been an interesting feature of Gautham (Vasudev) Menon’s work. It’s been a tool almost every single time for the filmmaker to underline his expertise in making a film about love and modern-day romance. More often than not, action has helped him accentuate that core emotion and add a layer of grittiness. We remember Kaakha Kaakha (2003) as a love story even though the film is all about cops and criminals. We recall Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu (2006) for the classical romance it exuded despite it being a police procedural. We fondly remember a film like Yennai Arindhaal (2015) because it revealed on screen the tender, refined side of a superstar who is otherwise a tad lost in the garb of fame and frenzy.
In cases like Kaakha Kaakha and others, the trope is inherent to his treatment whereas in other scenarios, such as Achcham Yenbadhu Madamaiyada (2016) or even Enai Noki Paayum Thota (2019) to an extent, it becomes a revelatory instrument. In the former, violence and bravado are hardwired into his protagonists who must soften up when encountered by grace and beauty. When it comes to the latter, an already enamoured young man must realize that violence is part of him, especially in the face of adversity or in the event of him needing to ‘protect’ the one he loves.
The filmmaker’s latest outing, Joshua: Imai Pol Kaakha, interestingly falls under both categories. Here we get the same love-struck titular character but the catch is that he is already immersed in a world of violence and crime. The same violence, however, journeys from being the bane of the relationship to becoming its boon, or the saving grace. It’s an interesting, self-referential spin and GVM plays unabashedly with all his trademarks. From the ‘flawed’, smug urban hero to the idea of pulling out all the possible stops for the sake of love, Joshua has the director’s name written all over it. Except that something isn’t right here and even though you know you are watching a seasoned filmmaker at work, it almost feels like he has gone out of his way to parody himself.
An all-over-the-place GVM
For starters, there’s that air of inauthenticity to the world that the characters inhabit here. Joshua, played by Varun, is a ruthless contract killer and is in love with Kundavi, a lawyer soon to be part of the legal team fighting a major Mexican drug lord. She finds out he kills people for a living and leaves him, he then asks his handler Madhavi (Divyadarshini) to give him a more honorable job. ‘Hang on,’ says Madhavi, before hinting at the opportunity for him to bodyguard the very woman he broke up with a couple of weeks ago. Why does she need a bodyguard? Turns out the drug lord ‘Leguiziamo’ has a bounty on the heads of the legal team fighting against him and Kundavi happens to be the only one remaining alive on the panel. The case, we gather, will be heard in a matter of days.
So, in the tall pursuit of protecting his client/love-interest here, Joshua (and also Kundavi, to an extent) must endure battles against international hitmen, local gangsters (played by Mansoor Ali Khan and Krishna) and also uncover a nexus related to Leguiziamo himself on the side. GVM wishes to be relentless with his approach in the sense that the action, which is the film's only asset, hardly stops and the channel with which the story is told to us. There’s a nice sense of hurriedness and tension in these portions and the director seems like he is in his element. At least a little. Surprisingly, it’s the ‘love’ portion that he doesn’t deliver on.
Another major sore point of the film is the fact that everything transpires with the flavour and depth of a table read of the script. Gautham Menon seems slightly all over the place with the mood that he wants to create and the intent here, perhaps, is to find the right cross between something slick and Westernized like a Bodyguard (the series) and his own local noir milieu of Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu (2022). But he somehow loses grip on either and what we get is a barrage of ideas that are thrown out the window, just the way logic is. GVM is pretty, pretty clueless here.
Ideas, squandered
But the ideas are definitely there, sitting erect and heaving in front of us. At one point, not very long into the story, we see that there’s a potential reversal in roles, in that Kundavi takes charge and tries to protect ‘Josh’ instead. I thought this would be an interesting self-referential spin for the director, but that wasn’t to be. In another setup, we see the film taking the shape of a rather unconventional love story, in which two lovers on the run must find a way to accept their highly dysfunctional and volatile relationship. A third prominent idea arrives much later in the film, when we see the hero and villain realizing that they are perhaps long-lost friends!
Almost each of these promises is squandered and left completely undealt with, leaving you puzzled about the lack of nuance that someone like GVM is known so much for. True, he has proven he could be erratic and a little half-hearted at times but Joshua, as a film, seems nowhere close to being in his realm. In one scene, Kundavi says ‘My Villain, My Rockstar’ to Joshua who emotes, in return, as much as the wall behind him. Moments later, she says ‘Can I slap you?’ The idea, the essence, is there: of a quintessential GVM-like love story taking birth under a new conceit. But the plasticity in both performance and in the way the world is weaved is just so unbelievable, that you don’t almost ever sense the love or the drama.
Varun carries the gait of a contemporary dancer and is effective during the action portions, which have a strong dose of John Wick in them. But he, just like Raahei, delivers his lines quite disingenuously and it doesn’t help that the script at hand is dense and verbose. GVM loves his characters slipping in a line in English or two but this time around he goes quite overboard with this and the conversations at one point even start to feel cringe.
As pointed out, the attempt to construct a new kind of love story is very much apparent in Joshua: Imai Pol Kaakha, but what’s missing is the care and the precision. Everything seems cursory and unimaginative, from the locations, the cinematography to the music, and the result is not even a semblance of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Maybe the long-pending release of Dhruva Natchathiram, which is said to be part of the same universe, could help elevate this film and lend some context. As a standalone film, however, Joshua: Imai Pol Kaakha is a forgettable experience.
