Vettaiyan

Athiyan is a senior police officer and known in the region. His method is plain: he kills the criminal he catches without taking him to court, and it is called an encounter. The public backs him, the press celebrates him, his superiors look away. A teacher is killed and the pressure grows. Athiyan finds a suspect and does the same thing. Then a human rights lawyer opens the file and shows the man he killed did not commit the crime. Athiyan has to accept it. The real culprit is still outside and there is a large structure behind him. T. J. Gnanavel directs. Rajinikanth plays Athiyan and Amitabh Bachchan the lawyer; Fahadh Faasil and Rana Daggubati are in the cast. The language is Tamil. Gnanavel had earlier made Jai Bhim, which was also about the law and police violence. The matter it treats is killing without trial; the film appears to celebrate the practice and then bills its own hero for it. Amitabh Bachchan's character carries the argument and the scenes between the two actors are at the centre. Its second strand is the private education business and the examination system; the criminal organisation is tied to it. Its limit is balance; the star shape and the critical argument weaken each other and the action sections contradict the argument. Another limit is length; the narrative is long and the last section speeds up. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil cinema and Rajinikanth. Who it is not for: the contradiction between message and genre is plain, it runs long, and the violence is explicit.