I would like to tell u about the movie kabali.Make no mistake. There is a story about something big and important – Tamilians getting exploited as foreign workers in Malaysia, and how they were not given equal wages by the British rulers. There is his gang warfare with a Chinese ganglord that takes the center stage later.
But that story is just the backdrop to Kabali’s story. And Kabali is Rajinikanth. And when Kabali is in the movie, how can the movie be about anything else. Even a character named Tamilvesan is shoved aside to accommodate him. It is Rajinikanth all the time. He calls the shots, he fights the best, he shoots the best, he romances the best.Kabali doesn’t have the lovely rhythms of Attakathi or Madras, where Ranjith gave us a sense of life being lived with micro-shots of people just… being. This isn’t to say Ranjith is coasting. He’s still trying to stage scenes. A scene where someone tries to assassinate Kabali could have just been about the assassination but the way Ranjith stages it carries an element of surrealism. But yet again, it works better on paper than on screen.