Thug Life Movie Review: Kamal Haasan, Mani Ratnam's 'game of thrones' is a cinematic endurance test

Thug Life Movie Review & Rating: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, The Dark Knight) warned the world, particularly those so-called saviours who never seem to vacate the throne, nor evolve enough to remain worthy of it over time.

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However, not everyone seems to have received the memo or grasped the implications of that line. Illustrating its meaning loud and clear, Mani Ratnam has delivered what is arguably his weakest film to date, the Kamal Haasan-starrer Thug Life. Worse still, the only way one could even identify it as a Mani Ratnam film is the grandiosity of its visuals and the occasional brilliance of its long shots. If not for these, Thug Life would have felt like an unending gangster drama, crafted by an overambitious filmmaker (anyone, really) whose only asset was ambition and nothing more.

After opening with a visually well-crafted scene that introduces Rangaraya Sakthivel’s (Kamal Haasan) lifelong ‘tryst’ with death, dating back to the moment of his birth, Thug Life cuts to a flashback set in Old Delhi, 1994. A gangster based in the capital, Sakthivel is steadily expanding his horizons and is set to dethrone his supposed crime guru Sadanand (Mahesh Manjrekar). Following a tense meeting in an old residential building occupied by tens of middle-class families, Sadanand snitches on Sakthivel and his gang to the police, who quickly surround the area. As a shootout ensues, Sakthivel, his elder brother Manickam (Nassar) and others attempt to flee. Amid the chaos, Sakthivel finds a young boy, Amaran, orphaned in the crossfire. Guilt-ridden, he adopts the boy and raises him as his own brother/son/protégé.