‘Leader’ movie review: ‘Legend’ Saravanan is the dark knight in this largely gripping masala actioner

It was hard not to reminisce about the once-in-a-lifetime experience of watching a 4 AM show of Saravana Stores honcho Saravanan’s much-hyped debut, The Legend, in 2022. It was a campy shockathon that exorcised the film lover in yours truly and left a hollowed-out skeleton in his place.

So as you can imagine, I let out a huge sigh of relief and settled into my seat when Saravanan made a much simpler entry in Leader, the kind that doesn’t have EDM music blaring into your eardrums. And I’m happy to report that this isn’t the case with just the entrance — in his sophomore film as a hero, Saravanan redeems himself with a more serious approach; his hero is no longer the walking Saravana Stores cut-out but a more human figure who can move within a narrative. Sure, there are ample heroism — the intermission has him slow-walk towards the camera away from a gigantic explosion — but most of these moments seem tethered to a serious action-drama register, all thanks to writer-director RS Durai Senthilkumar. 

‘Legend’ Saravanan in a still from ‘Leader’
| Photo Credit:
Think Music India/YouTube

We begin with a lot of urgency, which is justified given there’s a lot to unpack and set up. Salt (Prabhakar), a local goon and the kingpin of the Thoothukudi port, promises an international syndicate head, The Devil (Santhosh Prathap), to execute a secret plan involving a shipment of illegal Ammonium Nitrate containers at the port. Meanwhile, Inspector Chandhra Sathyamoorthy’s (Andrea Jeremiah) attempts to investigate and expose Salt are repeatedly put down by superiors, who, we realise soon, have their hands in Salt’s pockets. Thankfully, Chandhra finds support in the newly appointed lieutenant colonel-turned-cop, SP Bakthavachalam (Shaam), but the latter dissuades Chandhra from conducting any investigation on her own.

But Chandhra, expectedly, continues her probe and sets her eyes on a local mechanic named Shakthivel (Saravanan), who routinely enters the port to work on Salt’s cars. However, in a sudden turn of events, a misunderstanding pits Shakthivel against Salt and his goons, which is when we, and Chandhra, begin to realise that Shakthi may be more than just a mechanic — it’s Shakthi’s world we are all living in.

When the story begins, Saravanan does something right off the bat that no mainstream hero has effectively aimed to do — he criticises the new-gen audiences who can’t stand to see any familial emotions and are quick to dismiss such ideas as ‘cringe.’ Of course, everything about these sequences between Shakthi and his daughter Irene is cringeworthy, but hey, he tries. For every five sober ideas in the script, there is an insufferable campy idea. Like when a secret agent takes her mother to an actual shootout to show her that a man is a colleague and isn’t her romantic partner. This is a film where organs in the body can shift places to suit the convenience of the plot. And it’s in a world where nobody raises an alarm upon seeing a mechanic live a lavish life, or why his boss would let his employee live with him — oh wait, perhaps it’s better to believe that Saravanan is questioning class stereotypes and traditional work-place equations. My bad.

But all that said, when Leader decides to soar, it does quite well to grip your attention and pull you back into its rollercoaster ride of a plot. The film is so pacy with so much happening that Senthilkumar can sneak in anything atrocious, and we would still give it a pass. The 20-minute sequence before the intermission is a blast on and off the screen; it single-handedly makes you forgive any slips in the first half, but we can’t say the same for what follows. The film drops into the trenches when we begin the dreadful flashback of who Shakthivel really is, and nothing makes any sense anymore, at least until we get back on track with the central thread about The Devil’s plans with the Thoothukudi port.

A still from ‘Leader’
| Photo Credit:
Think Music India/YouTube

The third act powers through contrivances to end on a largely satisfying note. It reveals what Senthilkumar seemed to have tactfully done all along. He unravels several ideas that we realise are set-ups for necessary pay-offs, such as Irene needing a hearing aid, or Chandhra looking at a photo of a man who looks like The Devil, or a wrist watch-bomb that The Devil had devised for his enemies. Even an idea that we saw earlier in Sivakarthikeyan’s Madharaasi is used effectively in Leader.

In his second outing, Saravanan has thankfully discovered the easier route to becoming a mainstream hero: he doesn’t try to ‘act.’ Of course, there’s a melodramatic moment that briefly exposes him; however, he has largely submitted to a director who shows maturity. He’s not the hero we deserve. He’s not the hero Tamil cinema needs. But he’s the Legend we have. And if all his films turn out to be like Leader, perhaps that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Leader is currently running in theatres