Master Review : A Fifty percent Vijay movie goes a long way with a sensible filmmaker.

 

When Lokesh Kanagaraj said in some of his promotional interviews that Master is going to be a 50% Lokesh film and 50% Vijay film, that proposition sounded a tad too good to be true. However, the director has stayed true to his words to an extent with a convoluted yet “mainstream” Vijay film. Master is the sort of thing that happens when a director with a more westernized sensibility meets a superstar like Vijay whose fanbase essentially dictates a series of done to death masala tropes in the sub-genre of “Vijay mass movies” that cant be left out from the final output. Master is about JD (Vijay) an alcoholic college lecturer whose reckless existence in life is challenged by a chance encounter with a shoddy gangster Bhavani (Vijay Sethupathi) whose illicit business forces JD to rethink his life up until that point of time. We have all the nice little “Lokesh touches” we have come to expect from the two film old director in his first big budget “superstar potboiler ” like the frequent references from the yesteryear films of Kamal Haasan , the Tarantino-sque use of old songs in vital scenes to bring in conflicting tone shifts , a leading man who is hesitantly forced to take up a particular mission in an effort to redeem himself , to name a few of them.

What sets Master apart from the usual “Vijay formula” that we have been so fine tuned to watch in the recent years stems from a singular filmmaking presence that tries to subvert some of the mainstays of the quintessential Vijay blockbuster templates like the nearly flawless hero, an underwritten villain , pointless romantic encounters , frequent unwarranted cut away songs , random political inserts in the form of dialogues and action to drive Vijay’s political standing home from time to time among many others. This is not to say that Lokesh has placed the “ the brand of Vijay ” in a complete experimental space and on the contrary Master is a mashup of all the usual been there done that space for Vijay and the misleading logline might look like just another 200 crore club Vijay film ( a fairly commonplace landmark for his films these days ) only slightly different in its intentions!

Master looks like a step in the right direction for Vijay the star as it strikes the very hard balance of being a big event spectacle as well as being a coherently thought out piece of engaging cinema , something that is rare in a Vijay movie these days. There are some obvious issues with some parts of the film being cut off to trim down its excessive running time nearly clocking three hours. None of the characters except for the primary players, hero and the villain seem to be put there for any particularly rewarding cause other than to be casual spectators up until the final act. Lokesh’s decision to go ahead with a literally nonexistent backstory for JD works big time like the nameless, past less heroes of spaghetti westerns films. Vijay outdoes himself in each film in terms of onscreen swag and panache and pulls off the quirky character arc with graze. Andrea’s final appearance in the film felt like a total mess even though Lokesh tries to set it up nicely. Master is not Sarkar, Mersel or Bigil by any means but that somehow makes it even the more interesting as case study in mainstream Tamil screenwriting in recent years.