Master Analysis

 Master (2021)

Written and Directed by: Lokesh Kanagaraj
Read this after you've seen the film.

The film opens with a solid 15 minutes - Vijay Sethupathi's character development - I was pumped up after watching this because I think this is as good as the opening scene of S. S. Rajamouli's Sye - where they show us Bikshu Yadav. This is even better I'd say - we see how Bhavani from childhood has endured all the crap in the world and has turned out physically and mentally numb. He's like a beast. His punch seems scary. The film opens with this solid of a prologue, and it takes till the interval to get back to this.

Again the same, the inciting incident happens at the interval - till then, a lot of meandering happens. We see the master being an alcoholic for the entire 1st half. At the interval, he becomes indirectly guilty for the death of two kids - and yet, the seriousness of the situation isn't there in the film. For example, in Mersal when two kids die due to the lack of a hospital, we feel the urgency of the situation. Here, we don't. This film could've had a solid character arc for the master, from being an irresponsible alcoholic to a responsible citizen with consistently proving him wrong with multiple incidents - but the film turns everything upside down with one incident, like they did in Temper and Bommarillu. Sure, it's definitely possible that we change with one incident - but we as the audience don't feel the change there.

This felt like an out and out Vijay film. I couldn't see Lokesh Kanagaraj - apart from the extensive intercutting between scenes, and his thing for lorries. When I saw that the film is 3 hours long, I had doubts if it would have the Lokesh Kanagaraj treatment - because it's not easy to have such fluid editing/ storytelling for that long a runtime. Wolf of Wall Street achieves that. In this film, we see such scenes - where the introduction of Master is intercut with Malavika Mohanan's character joining new. But we don't see much of this in the film.