A still from âWeaponâ
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Movies often tend to become products of filmmakers who are stuck in echo chambers, refusing to look beyond and above their own fascinations and perspectives. Guhan Senniappanâs superhero film Weapon is the latest testimony to that. Despite all the fuss behind Marvel and DCâs poor show in the last five years; despite how some Hollywood productions have popularly managed to deal with growing superhero fatigue; despite previous attempts in Tamil cinema teaching us the perils of not rooting the story to the milieu; and even with an Indian title like Minnal Murali breaking formulas, we have Weapon, a two-hour showreel of done-to-dust superhero tropes that comes across more like a childâs make-believe story with action-figures.
From start to finish, the film lacks any sense of flow but just the first 30 minutes should tell you how trite the ideas are, and how messy screenwriting could get. In Weapon, the superpowers come from a superhero serum (akin to the one in Captain America) that was stolen from the Nazis by an Indian soldier during Netaji Subhash Chandraboseâs meeting with Hitler in 1942. When the Swastika brigade comes to India to retrieve their prized possession, the soldier injects it into his son, Mithran, who grows up to become a superhuman (Sathyaraj) with superhuman strength, telekinesis, and telepathy.
Weapon (Tamil)
Director: Guhan Senniappan
Cast: Sathyaraj, Vasanth Ravi, Tanya Hope, Rajiv Menon
Runtime: 120 minutes
Storyline: A youtuber searching for a myserious superhuman crosses paths with a secret society headed by a supervillain
But in the grand scheme of things in the world of Weapon, Mithran is a mere cog in the wheel. In the present day, a blast at a Neutrino power plant spools out many interconnected subplots, one no better than the other and with characters as shallow as it can get. We have Agni (Vasanth Ravi), a YouTuber chasing after superheroes to use them for ecological preservation. Then thereâs the Black Society 9, a Hydra-like organisation that controls the Indian economy, headed by Dev Krishnav a.k.a DK (Rajiv Menon); heâs a Lex Luthor figure with the intellect of Kingpin, who uses children to illegally test his Limb Regeneration serum taken from lizards (The speed with which these limbs grow would put Marvel characters Deadpool and Lizard to shame). Oh, did I mention a beefed-up assassin named Solomon who gets blackmailed to go on a final mission?
Also getting screen time is a rag-tag team of assassins, the concept of âKundalini energyâ, the aura that humans apparently possess, glowing bees-like flying devices, and a Cyborg-esque lead to a sequel. Phew!
A still from âWeaponâ
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
And none of these characters or ideas manage to register in this hotch-potch mess. Even veteran actor Sathyaraj gets the raw end of the deal. Having a superpower that demands minimal action ensures that the 69-year-old Sathyaraj looks as formidable as this Logan-meets-Professor X-meets-Jean Grey figure. But heâs hamstrung in a plot that uses him only as a showpiece to centre the plot around. If there was any scope for an emotional investment in the story, it was in the pathos that birthed it all â how Mithran grew up to be â but using slideshows of shoddy-looking AI-generated images adds a certain plasticity.
Now, while all this signals a poorly-written screenplay, what makes watching the film a more testing exercise is its editing, conception of scenes, and staging. In a pivotal scene, a child crossing a road is saved by a âmysterious figureâ from a recklessly driven lorry; in the plot, it is meant to birth pivotal surveillance footage evidence of superhumans. If the scene instantly reminds you of Christopher Reeveâs Superman or Sam Raimiâs Spiderman, you know how the fundamental idea of superheroes came to be in pop culture. And just the writing, execution, and editing of this scene â and the way the surveillance footage is shot â should tell you that while Guhan might be a fan of superhero cinema, the filmmaker in him with a zeal to make superhero content needs to step out of his filter bubble and explore. For now, on Marvelâs Earth-1218 and DCâs Earth 33, his film remains a forgettable misfire which none of his superhumans manage to save.
Weapon is currently running in theatres