Critics reviews

Thug Life, which is so dense on a conceptual level, can become especially alienating as an action film about succession among gangsters.

It is not a bad film, but one that feels stuck, caught somewhere between honouring the past and finding a new voice. This unresolved tension leaves the film feeling distant when it should have been deeply engaging.

Thug Life, which bafflingly feels like a Mani Ratnam-ish film that gave in to the mainstream compulsion of being a modern-day Tamil potboiler. A 163-minute chronicle of an elderly gangster’s tryst with love, destiny, guilt and death, Thug Life is a gangster crime drama with stretches so generic and cold that you might wonder if it was really the filmmaker at the helm.

Illustrating its meaning loud and clear, Mani Ratnam has delivered what is arguably his weakest film to date, the Kamal Haasan-starrer Thug Life. Worse still, the only way one could even identify it as a Mani Ratnam film is the grandiosity of its visuals and the occasional brilliance of its long shots. If not for these, Thug Life would have felt like an unending gangster drama, crafted by an overambitious filmmaker (anyone, really) whose only asset was ambition and nothing more.