The Star, The Story, And The Struggle: Kamal Haasan's 'Thug Life' Doesn’t Quite Land

The just concluded IPL may have had a lesson or two for Thug Life. 

The T20 league showed that assembling a great team and invoking grand ambition may alone be not enough for ultimate success. The players need a larger mooring point to keep going, and for the audience to stay invested. 

At the centre of Thug Life is a great team — a legendary actor, a legendary director, a powerhouse cast, and a genre that has historically resonated with Tamil audiences. However, the film’s inability to create and sustain an emotional connection with anything or anyone, may be its undoing.

The film, as it happens, starts with promise. Unlike many commercial movies that lean heavily into slow-motion arrival, applause-bait dialogues, and reverential framing, Thug Life commendably avoids building a shrine to its main man Kamal Haasan.

The hero is introduced, not with any great mass flourish, but almost with restraint. If anything, it's the STR character (Amaran) that gets the typical grandiose entry.  There is no desperate attempt to deify Kamal's screen presence. If anything, the real Thug Life moment arrives right at the stroke of film's culmination — the hero nonchalantly dons his coolers with a swag while AR Rahman's anthemic Vinveli Nayaga echoes behind in glorifying exuberance.

The film also makes a visible effort to split narrative space with its many characters, to decentralise power, as it were, to allow the ensemble to breathe. But that generosity falls flat, not because of intent, but because of execution. The characters, though evenly distributed, are not deeply drawn. Their emotional and psychological interiors are paper-thin, and in trying to say everything, the film ends up saying nothing that matters.

More Style, Less Substance

Thug Life, as with any Mani Ratnam movie, is meticulously mounted. The visuals are kinetic, the frames loaded with mood, the world imagined with a stylized precision. But here this visual flair seems a crutch. It’s a film that wants to talk about defiance, and inherited trauma, but forgets that even the most grand themes must be rooted in human feelings. What we get is intent without intimacy. 

In Nayakan (1987), the previous iconic collaboration between Mani and Kamal, we got an insight into the moral quandary of Sakthivel Naicker. His dilemma was: To battle for the underdogs, some lines of the law have to be crossed. Here, with his almost namesake Rangaraaya Sakthivel, we are handed no such illumination. With Sakthivel Naicker, we were provided a peep both into the violence and kindness that simultaneously made him. But we barely get a clue about Rangaraaya Sakthivel's inner compulsions, if he had one in the first place.  He is the boss of a gangster group in Delhi. The character comes across as flatly and tamely as the preceding sentence.  

In Nayakan, we could practically smell Bombay's Dharavi as the young Mani managed to conjure up the place almost with 3-D veracity. But here, despite the visually beautiful frames of Ravi K Chandran, we don't get any aspect of Delhi, forget about feeling its heart.

An Ensemble Without Weight

The primary failure of Thug Life, as we said, is narrative shallowness. The characters, as the cliché would have it, are barely etched; the emotional arcs feel pasted on as afterthoughts. For a film supposedly about vengeance and legacy, it rarely stirs the soul. The screenplay coasts on aesthetics and, what the youth of the day call as, vibes. There is no moment of vulnerability that truly lands, no relationship that builds slowly enough for us to care, no conflict that anchors the external chaos. 

For instance, the protagonist's love for his wife is deep and hearty. Yet, this man has an equally passionate fling --- filled suggestions of relentless sexual intimacy --- outside his marriage. This strange dichotomy, in itself, should have been fascinating. But here it comes across as just easy philandering of a morals-less don. 

Or take for instance, the angle about possibly the biggest treason in a man's life: His disciple lusting after his (the mentor's) woman. This powerful atavistic idea here seems just in service of a vacuous plot. We are no wiser about the younger man’s kinky transgression or the woman’s hapless plight of being a trophy for two testosterone-driven men.  

There is sibling rivalry and jealousy, again one of the major points of conflict in human life. But again, it doesn't register even a whit. A man loses his daughter to suicide. The poignancy of sentiments that should have gotten hold of us barely makes a dent inside us. There is a lost and found brother-sister angle too. When they eventually come together, there is no surge of feeling in us as in the preceding time, the ache of their separation had not been conveyed at all with any amount of conviction. 

We have a truckload of names in the cast (Trisha, Abhirami, Joju George, Nassar, Tanikella Bharani,  Aishwarya Lekshmi, Ashok Selvan, Bagavathi Perumal, Ali Fazal, Baburaj, Mahesh Manjrekar). None of them will honestly feel that they have a character that they can feel happy to recollect  years later.

Age Isn’t The Issue, But Its Erasure Is

It is a bit perplexing as to why Mani chose this story for a reunion with Kamal. The demands of a high-octane action film like Thug Life undeniably clash with the realities of his aging. The physical prowess and youthful aggression, often associated with a machismo-dripping gangster role, are inherently challenging to portray convincingly as one approaches his seventies.

While seasoned actors like Liam Neeson have carved out a niche in 'old man action' films, these roles often lean into the character's age, experience, and strategic intelligence rather than pure physical dominance. 

Thug Life, with its stylized action sequences and the protagonist's repeated, seemingly improbable survivals, make Kamal's character feel more like an invincible superhero than a vulnerable gangster. This lack of tangible stakes, stemming from the character's unrealistic resilience, further undermines the emotional impact and the audience's ability to truly believe in the danger he faces. The gravitas of age could have been used to deepen character complexity — a mentor, a haunted veteran, a morally ambiguous leader — but instead, Kamal is still thrust into bullet-ballets as though it were 1994.

There’s no law that bars senior actors from action films, but when age is denied and digitally blurred, the suspension of disbelief collapses. Kamal in Thug Life feels like an actor chasing relevance through genre, rather than a performer shaping a genre to suit his stage in life. Vikram, with similar surface-level characters and genre-continuing script, was accepted because it had at its helm a young director. You don't (can't) expect any better from youngsters. But with a seasoned pro like Mani, you want both heft and heave.     

The Curse Of Overexposure

When a film is touted as the grand re-gathering of legends or a cinematic masterpiece, any deviation from that inflated promise can lead to disproportionate disappointment. The Thug Life promotions, capitalising on the iconic pairing of  Kamal and Mani, might have created a perception of unparalleled cinematic brilliance that the actual film, with its narrative flaws and character limitations, simply couldn't live up to.

The relentless promotional overdrive, a ubiquitous strategy in modern cinema, seems to have worked against Thug Life. In the lead-up to the film’s release, Kamal embarked on an all-out promotional blitz. Press meets, long interviews, cryptic quotes, sweeping pronouncements, controversy-kindling throwaway lines — the full Kamal package. But instead of building mystique, it did the opposite. The film arrived in theatres already carrying the burden of too much explanation.

One cannot but also feel that, in a strange way, Kamal's intellect is sabotaging his cinema. This has become a pattern. We saw that in Indian 2 and Vikram promotions, too. Kamal, in his zeal to frame every movie as a socio-political act, often ends up stripping it of its agreeable artistic ambiguity. By the time audiences walk into the theatre, they feel like they’ve heard the movie described in 1000 words too many. The mystery is killed. The ideology is diluted. And the film, expected to match this over-articulation, falls short. Films need space to breathe. Thug Life, unfortunately, has arrived over-explained and underfelt.

To be sure, Thug Life is not a vanity project. It does not put Kamal on a pedestal, nor does it distort cinematic grammar to inflate his image. What it does, and fails at, is telling a compelling story that justifies its scale, cast, and ambition. In trying to move away from the banalities of star-driven cinema, it forgets that writing, not restraint, is the true antidote to image fatigue.