Last year, at the height of the Barbie vs. Oppenheimer craze, I went to the movies. I’d heard both were pretty solid (although definitely not in the demographic for the former) — but this was my first time in a theater in about a decade, and it was for neither one of the critically-acclaimed films that people within several thousand miles of me were interested in watching.

Instead, it was for Jailer, which I really had to seek out for some reason. It was actually easier to find a Telugu-dubbed version at local theaters, which is completely mystifying. I worry that this makes me sound like a discerning film viewer with subtle taste in underground foreign classics, which cannot be further from the truth — I don't watch that many movies, I have the taste of a Brit, and Jailer was from one of the bigger actors around. Tamil’s Rajinikanth simply doesn't translate well to non-Indian audiences, so I get some hipster credibility in this hemisphere for marking out the same way I did as a six-year-old.

To explain that complete lack of translation to Western mores, here’s an interesting article from someone trying to parse it:

Chandramukhi (2005) sees Rajinikanth play a psychiatrist so well-trained he can read minds based on a person’s facial expression. The movie starts with a marriage, becomes a haunted-house drama, pauses for a musical number in which hundreds of kites spell out “Superstar” in the sky, and then concludes with Rajinikanth fighting a half-naked martial-arts master on the roof during a fireworks display while hundreds of doves flap around. It broke Tamil box-office records, was the longest-running Tamil movie of all time—playing for 800 days at one theater—and became a cult hit in Germany under the title Der Geisterjäger.

(I will add, Chandramukhi is what I watched when I was six. Very funny to see someone else try to explain it.)

Basically, Indian cinema has two schools — the North does the dedicated Bollywood romances with Shahrukh Khan, and the South doesn’t really get romance (though it tries) but does get campy earnest violence. No one is campier or more earnest than Rajinikanth — a 70-year-old in a hairpiece who's essentially the platonic ideal of all those South Indian movie tropes, and consequently a member of Indian film royalty. Going through them individually probably explains more. I’d say it still works, but (and this is true) I was also recently reliably informed that I attended the opening of 1999’s Padayappa as a fetus, so my opinion might not be worth much in comparing them to other films. Nevertheless, I can probably still compare them to one another, so tierlist of the ones I found noteworthy in some way —

Ass

To digress a little, some of my favorite movies as a kid that weren't Rajini movies were Vijay movies. Vijay has a lot of the Rajini appeal without being quite as singular a presence, but younger and with some classics in his own right — particularly Ghilli, Master, and Thiruppachi. The last of those is pretty much literally what Annatthe seemed to go for — our hero as the older brother cleaning up the evil big city into which his younger sister married. There are differences like the sister running away in this one, but it's window dressing.

The issue, apart from the story being extraordinarily derivative of a younger star who did this same thing in 2005, is that it does so a lot worse. It's a lot sappier in execution, the romance digressions are a lot more annoying, the villains aren't nearly as compelling (no matching Kota Srinivasa Rao there), and Rajini is almost a parody of himself due to the direction and writing. The cool part of Thiruppachi (and most Rajini movies, I think) is that the main hero is obviously overpowered in fights, but has to find novel ways to solve problems — redirecting mobs, instigating shootouts, manipulating henchmen. In contrast, Annatthe is extremely straightforward in this regard in making the protagonist essentially omnipotent, putting the focus on the aspects that don't work at all.

Really the only noteworthy thing about this is that it contains the final song for a Rajini film from S. P. Balasubramaniam, who was just a brilliant vocalist and ridiculously prolific — he passed away before the film came out. As always, SPB’s great, but the song itself is carried by that performance while basically just being a worse version of the intro song from Muthu. Rajini does his usual, but this sucked. (40/100)

B-TIER - Solid

This might be the only hot take here, because I think most people consider Darbar the drizzling shits. I just can't in good conscience put it in the same tier as the above (and “solid” is a wide tier anyway), because I enjoy watching it while it’s on. Most of the supporting cast is extremely one-note, and for some reason there's a workout montage in the middle that makes less than no sense — but it uses Rajini well as a maverick police commissioner who flirts with complete insanity. It seems like every Indian movie feels the need for some sort of romance plot, but Darbar is smart in not focusing on that for long — the core of the story is more about the main character and his daughter, who's charming enough and where the story is only occasionally a bit cheesy.

Unlike Annatthe, it's also heavy on the schemes — the standout being the protagonist essentially forcing the bad guys to conduct a human sacrifice — and that sort of thing is where Rajini shines. It's a fringe B-minus, losing the thread most when it devolves into senseless violence but at least having a good narrative reason for it. A little routine and overlong, but enough going on — for the record, this is also how I feel about Kabali, except that one ends a little like The Sopranos which is cool.

Additionally, this is the first opportunity to mention Anirudh Ravichander, who composes the score for many of these films. He seems to have two modes — unreservedly tremendous instrumentals in the context of making a main character seem like the coolest person ever, and annoying hip-hop-influenced BGMs where he just says a bunch of random words in English. Darbar certainly straddles that divide — even the kind of pointlessly violent parts like the opening credits sequence kick ass because of the score, but can't carry the whole thing (and the same goes for the opening song, which is pretty much just Rajinikanth propaganda but he and SPB sell the crap out of it. I'd vote for him.) (81/100).

In some sense, Enthiran being a B (a high-ish B, to be fair) is rather damning —this thing had a price tag higher than the GDP of a mid-size country, and it came out…fine. More style than substance, but enough of both to be quite respectable. It looks great, the stars all deliver, and it sort of perfunctorily plumbs the normally imaginable depths of the robot movie genre (gets built, makes funny mistakes, makes serious mistakes, gains emotions, falls into the wrong hands, falls in love, replicates, goes murderously postal) but does it well. It's not a bad film by any means, it has the set pieces to justify the production cost (particularly by the end), and no one's a notable weak link.

I do struggle to say a lot more about it than that, though. Actually, my impression is that the expectations of a Rajinikanth/Aishwarya Rai/A.R. Rahman film that cost a million billion dollars somewhat hurt it more than it helped - director Shankar has much better work, both with Rajini (seen later) and otherwise (Mudhalvan, Indian, Anniyan). It's three hours and still overstuffed, spends a lot of time doing the same few things that don't necessarily lead anywhere, and sometimes falls into outright repetition. There are two “robot makes people making loud noises outside of the home shut up” scenes in a row, two “robot in love” songs that blend together a bit, and the “human horde fight the robot formations” thing was the coolest part of the movie but also had two separate ways that human-Rajini accomplished basically the same exact thing. On rewatch, the movie felt really slick but spread too thin, to the point where the main human antagonist just gets unceremoniously clapped (literally) halfway through the movie and no one misses him.

But it gets there in the end, the last scene of the robot dismantling itself does work. Knowing that there was a sequel (not on this list) that apparently dealt with totally different things, I think they could've just split this story, and made two A-minus films instead of one B. (86/100)

Jailer was neat. It has some of the same upside/downside as Nelson’s film with Vijay, Beast (which I liked! Not critic-friendly but it's fun when it's firing on all cylinders) — Nelson is at his best lending these family-friendly beat-em-ups a rawer and grislier edge, and kind of at his worst when he tries to be funny because it distracts from the point. I didn't care for the whole “heist” element of the movie, which takes over for a fair bit after the intermission and is a little too silly for my tastes, but the rest benefits a lot from just being actually quite graphic. The other big credit to the writing is that the villains here are actually very good — Vinayakan’s Varman benefits from the film being for adults, using conspicuous cruelty for a purpose while still clearly going off his own rails at some point, and the film uses one screamingly obvious twist at the intermission to set up a better one near the end with a second antagonist.

Otherwise, it's just good. Particularly as he's aged, Rajini has accordingly gone back to the “it's time to go back to the old me” plot — we’ll see it twice more later, and Jailer (while good) seems like the least…substantive of them. Partly it's because I don't really understand the link between being a brutal prison warden and commanding undying loyalty from prisoners/being a badass in the field when you don't have a bunch of other cops to enforce your authority — if anything, it seems backwards, and the flashbacks in the other movies of this type do more. But on the other hand, Jailer almost seems the most explicitly self-referential of the recent Rajini movies — Rajini does do a lot here, but it's also more about the power of the protagonist’s legend and influence than the protagonist himself, where a lot of the film is people talking about “Tiger” Muthuvel Pandian in hushed fearful tones and allowing him to be more of a commander than a doer. It's different and more sustainable for a 70-year-old, even if the core story isn't much of a coup. (87/100)

A-TIER - Great

This was a formative film for me, so I can't be objective and I'm not really going to try. I wouldn't ever say my family or I were avid superfans of Chandramukhi — but also, Rajini’s intro here is about the first time I can remember watching any movie, and a cassette of the soundtrack (again, SPB) is about all we had to listen to in the car. Judging this film is a little bit like if you had to objectively evaluate a weird cousin you grew up with — yes, it's possible to see the things other people do, but the familiarity makes it impossible to give the proper weight to those criticisms. I read the excerpt in the intro from Slate about Chandramukhi and I go “sure, but that's just how movies work.”

On rewatch, it's one of the most transparently silly Rajini movies in execution from front-to-back — it is thoroughly unashamed of what it is, and it features all-time comedian Vadivelu so there's no way it wouldn't be insane — but the actual story seems surprisingly interested in real things. The need for fight scenes in a Rajini film leads to a shoehorned-in antagonist, but it’s more about a psychologically-disturbed young woman and the role of both science and religion in curing what ails her. That's where the film shines — a whole family moves into a haunted house, and the film is basically an investigation into why actual haunted-house stuff keeps happening. For being known as a star of deeply unsubtle films, Rajini is surprisingly compelling just poking and prodding around a mystery.

If there's a drawback here, I think it's that the film can't exist in the real world as something that wants to uncontroversially make money, and commit to the protagonist's side on the “is she just ill, or is she possessed by the ghost of the woman murdered here” debate. It splits the difference and says that the victim was made uniquely vulnerable to the ghost by past trauma — which is a little unsatisfying because half the cast spent the runtime petrified by the threat, and the other half didn't care, but neither was proven right. Nevertheless, it's a great example of Indian mass-market cinema at its best — flawed conventionally but never boring. (91/100)

And now for something completely different!

India loves what's called the “masala” film, which to someone who's more used to siloed-off genres in the Western tradition seem tonally incoherent. For instance — the Tamil adaptation of Man on Fire, Tony Scott's classic rampage-of-revenge film, features a dance number after not-Creasy gets shot. It also has a bunch of totally unrelated comedy bits and a love triangle. Why? No one knows.

But the upside is that the stars of Indian film tend to be really versatile, and this is an example. I've omitted a lot of the less Rajini-y movies from this list, legitimately big hits that are less lead-driven action and more romances or dramas (leaving off Padayappa or Muthu is probably blasphemy in some circles, but those are very good while also just not being what I think of with the Rajinikanth genre) — but this all-out screwball film from 1981, I could not in good conscience ignore. Thillu Mullu is essentially two hours about a moustache, but Rajini and “Thenga” Srinivasan play off each other so well, and there are so many great moments just thrown away as random bits. One of those elite comedies you can't really recommend to people without sounding like an idiot. (94/100)

To date, Vettaiyan came out something like two weeks ago, so it’s a second one I sought out in theaters — partly to write this, but also, the concept was fairly intriguing considering the person in charge. T. J. Gnanavel’s biggest project to date was Jai Bhim, a fantastic film on a case of gruesome lockup murder by the police — it was unflinchingly contemptuous towards the Indian police and their oversteps, but then, those cops were supporting characters in the story of the lawyer and client. Vettaiyan, instead, was one of the biggest stars in Indian cinema playing a cop billed as an “encounter specialist” — “encounter” being the well-known Indian euphemism for an extrajudicial killing by the police, intended for escape attempts or self-defense situations but understood to occasionally be staged for less official purposes (think Roger’s death in Training Day). Vettaiyan translates directly to “hunter” — the protagonist of Gnanavel’s second big film would’ve been an abundantly clear antagonist of the first, essentially the police department’s contract killer. The stage seemed to be set for Rajinikanth’s Spec Ops: The Line — where the tropes of the genre were invoked as heavily as possible just to brutally subvert them and make everyone feel bad— but that’s hard to pull off while keeping the film classically good for the reasons that people watch movies. Even what I mentioned, Spec Ops: The Line, arguably didn’t pull that off — as a truly terrific story that’s also a bit of a chore.

I think Vettaiyan did better and did manage to thread that needle, but seemed to split its focus a little too much — on first watch, it was 75% of the cleanest S-tier on this entire list, and about 25% B. The first half did not miss at all — it almost rushed through the usual Rajinikanth playlist of him kicking ass and shooting bad guys, and also rushed through the usual “policeman protagonist” tropes of films like Saamy (of a weak and bureaucratic legal system that let obviously guilty people operate for far too long), only to quickly flip into a repudiation of vigilantism and trial by media. In response to the murder of a beloved schoolteacher, the public demands quick answers more vociferously than it does correct ones; the cops rush what looks like a straightforward investigation, bring in the hangman to appease the wolves, everyone (including the audience — the violence of the murder is intentionally revisited again and again) is happy to see the perpetrator get smoked, but it turns out to be a frame-up. It helps that the person calling the biggest star of Tamil cinema an amoral maniac was the biggest star of Hindi cinema — Bachchan doesn’t have a ton of scenes here, but his presence is massive as the deliberate judge juxtaposed against the hot-blooded cop, and the reveal of one of the dead men being innocent is very well done. Also, “justice delayed is justice denied — justice hurried is justice buried” is such a great line to give him.

Past the first half, which integrates the usual Rajini with Jai Bhim-esque investigation scenes and a real moral question, the second half settles into more usual Rajini territory — he knows who the bad guy is for sure now, so the question is whether he’s learned anything. What helps a lot here is that, even beyond Bachchan, the supporting cast has another ace — Fahad Fassil is consistently brilliant as “Battery” Patrick, the protagonist’s thief/police informant sidekick, and his chemistry with Rajini’s Athiyan (and his death) are the highlight of the more straightforwardly-action second half. However, the actual antagonist and the secondary focus of the film bring it down a little bit, in that TJG’s interest in injustice among classes is a great wrinkle to the “vigilantism” point — why don’t the police rush into “encounter”-ing the rich politicians, and just do it for the poor? — but seems tacked on as an independent point. Half 2 is quality but more about the main antagonist defrauding poor people via education, which is solid but without the tight focus of the first half — it’s saved by just being very well-made as an Indian-style action movie and the real point of the movie (at least to me) making appearances in key moments. Vettaiyan does run out of new ideas but can lean on the classic tradition to stay strong late — overall, terrific late-career effort. (94/100)

S-TIER - All-Timer

Sivaji is director Shankar at his absolute peak of Shankar-ness, and that's nothing but a compliment. Somewhat like Vettaiyan above, Sivaji wants to say something real — it casts a broad net towards the same things that Shankar hated in Indian or Mudhalvan, government corruption and inefficiency, and “vast amorphous crew of bad guys” is perfect for a Rajini film. Unlike those other two films — the former just a straightforward vigilante movie, the latter about fixing the government from within — Sivaji is basically a guy going full capitalist Joker. He also turns his face white, although that’s in a different context.

The story is basically riches-to-rags-to-riches for the titular Sivaji, who is played by Rajinikanth (who is, confusingly, also actually named Sivaji) — the wealthy American comes back to his home nation to provide education and medical care free of charge, only to get stopped over and over by bureaucrats asking for grease money. He eventually graduates to being stopped by high-level bureaucrats asking for grease money, and then asking for the same grease money again. Outside of the (necessary) romance subplot, the first half of the film is basically just Sivaji being broken down from his pedestal and paying his entire fortune to the government, getting absolutely zero things done in the process and ending up on the street with his uncle (the late great comedian Vivek). There’s something to be said about India’s recent turn towards something approximating despotism — and Sivaji seems to show the prevailing opinion of the status quo before then, of a government too weak and corrupt to do anything worthwhile. Rajini’s finally faced an opponent he can’t defeat with pure might — or can he?

As it turns out, “pure might” is pretty much the solution here, and Sivaji turns the entire thing around by just blackmailing every single rich person in the state out of their “black money” — that is, money that they’d hidden from the state for tax purposes. He doesn’t just defeat the government, but eventually replaces it, and when the toothless government tries to kill him after being released from jail, he simply bears being tortured to death and then comes back after a couple of days like Jesus. The romance subplot here is notably very uncomfortable, which knocks off a few points (although par for the course for Indian cinema) — but everything else is done well, and I hope it doesn’t need to be explained why this is pretty much the definitive Rajini movie. After a point, it’s just him stunting on people nonstop while being a treatise in favor of Longism. There’s a lot of “North Korean propaganda” energy to more recent Rajinikanth offerings, and none more than this one, but it leans so wholeheartedly into the premise that it comes out the other side as basically being a story about what would happen if a billionaire were actually as cool as Elon Musk’s self-image. (96/100)

Actually, while we’re at it…

Petta is essentially a love letter to Badshah (or Baasha, the transliteration is different to what they call it in English), maybe Rajinikanth’s most beloved film ever. I'm going to talk about the former more, because the latter kind of suffers from the “Seinfeld is Unfunny” effect after watching the former (and Jailer) but the 1995 hit is a stone-cold classic — Rajini goes to the “back to the old me” storyline fairly often, but Badshah is the progenitor and quintessence of it, and also manages to have a banger song about how cool taxi drivers are.

That said, Petta being so good is insane to me, because it's basically fanfiction openly directed by a Rajinikanth fan. Everything about it plays to Rajinikanth in a Rajinikanth movie being the coolest person in the entire world, doubles and triples down on that concept and is jam-packed with references to past Rajinikanth movies, but synthesizes it all into a great film in its own right. The problem with this sort of “greatest hits” filmmaking is that they're often too unoriginal to really work, and there's some element of that here — we once again see Rajinikanth as an enigmatic figure forced by an age-old threat to return to a dark past, involving his Muslim best friend getting murdered (yes, that's in both films). But that's a versatile base story as long as you take it interesting places, Petta ultimately did, and spent the more derivative portions getting everything possible from all the talent it had at its disposal.

I think what I liked the most about it on rewatch, that said, is that it really exploited an underexplored aspect of the Rajini film. Most of these movies, Petta included, know that he can hold up his end as a protagonist or in lighter plots, but the average Rajinikanth character at this point is also terrifying — Petta uniquely, gradually turns the titular hero into a decidedly gray character without trying to redeem him (as Vettaiyan does). He's not just on a righteous quest by the end — he’s grotesquely savoring the death by firing-squad of a fragile old man needing his inhaler, after tricking the man’s own son into being the Trojan Horse (and subsequently executing him too). But it feels totally normal because he's the same character in a different context, with the same sort of bravado and a complete inability to lose — even when he's just a good guy, the opening credits are like something from a horror movie:

It's a stroke of genius in keeping it a Rajini movie stylistically, but completely recontextualizing those elements. There haven't been many clips in this list and I'm about to go with a second one for one film, because this is basically a great symbol for the philosophy of the whole thing.

The score starts out with the well-known Annamalai tune (played in every Rajini title card at this point) before transforming into the movie’s own — a fusion of the classic Rajini film and something different. The aging superstar himself is shot like he's been voted onto Mount Olympus and the song is basically “this guy is so cool, holy shit” — it sounds like a victory lap because that's exactly what it is. In terms of discrete components, Petta seems like the best Rajini film ever — the score is brilliant and Anirudh’s best (and has an SPB song!), the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous throughout, the villain isn’t given a whole lot of attention but is extremely effective for what he is, it’s creatively written with no weak links in terms of diologue or casting, and it’s a violent film that has enough wrinkles in execution not to just rely on the violence. Narratively, Petta is just about all you can ask for as a Rajini film, where Indian film’s Hulk Hogan turns into Hollywood Hogan and no one cares enough to notice. (99/100)