In the last ten years, there have been countless Hollywood superhero films. Whenever we watch one that we like, we inevitably ask ourselves why we can’t make it too. Perhaps this is what gave rise to the new Tamil film Weapon. Maybe that’s why characters seem to resemble Magneto and Superman. Maybe that’s why Hitler and his Swastika symbol loom large. I thought a particular character looked like Bucky, another landed and posed like Iron Man. In fact, it feels as though this film is trying too hard to tick every possible box of a Hollywood superhero cinema template. There are laboratory experiments. There is an evil powerful all-controlling elite. There’s a group of assassins (or Uhssawsins as the film calls them many times). The idea of a super-soldier. The idea of cloning Someone else cares about ecology conservation. Someone else talks about genetic modification And all these ideas get randomly mixed up in this two hour long movie. If you’re wondering how it could possibly do justice to exploring so many different things well, it doesn’t.
I don’t know what’s happening in this film from one minute to the next but then again, neither does the background score because its attempts at convincing us something awesome is happening keep changing too quickly Here’s NSG capturing someone. Oh wait here’s a YouTubers group and a song about that No wait let’s look at an evil businessman Hang on here are some evil elite people who control everything Or maybe you’d rather see some assassins? I could go on and on as the film does, introducing us incoherently to all these ideas and then struggling to bring them together into a meaningful entertaining whole All the awkward (and often silly) conversations in the film don’t help A woman whose life has been saved by a super-hero figure suddenly decides after interval that he’s a monster and needs another character to tell her that he saved her life from the people who are trying to kill her themselves A man who’s hiring a group of assassins tells them that his data on them shows they have achieved 100 percent of their targets “I’ve hired more than 30 groups of assassins who have all been killed,” he warms up. “But I pick you because you target the enemy’s weakness.” Uh, as opposed to what. Some corporate conversations are more engaging.
Weapons sometimes also feels like an assemblage of advertisement footage. For example, some from the Visit Theni campaign. Or some from the Elephants Are Our Friends campaign. Still, in any case it seems like the entire elephant-Mithran (Sathyaraj) bond is established in a song as a belated afterthought, as if someone suddenly realised that there’s nothing up till that point in the second half to make us care about any character. The film also constantly telegraphs its developments in advance. You see an elephant being introduced suddenly; you know what’s coming. You see Vinothini Vaidyanathan’s character with a child; you know what’s coming. Even the big Vasanth Ravi twist amounts to little, and his sudden U-turn concerning a character feels downright absurd. Amidst all this, we also get blocks of exposition, where a narrator tells you the story to some cool, graphic visuals. At one point, I thought this seemed a lot more interesting than all the live-action footage.
The VFX is quite decent and if there’s any merit to Weapon at all it’s that certain ambitious action ideas are executed in ways that don’t have us stifling laughter throughout. I thought the pre-interval Sathyaraj action block was quite decent too even if all the slo-mo meant that this one-sided fight just kept going on and on and on. But really narratively speaking the only idea I cared about a bit was Mithran being Sathyaraj Hancock-figure. A reclusive super-powerful individual minding his own business? A better movie would’ve spent more time on him and truly allowed us to understand his pain and loneliness.
If they can do it why can’t we do it? This usually leads into rant about our smaller budgets and lack of VFX know how blah blah blah blah. With Weapon, I see the ambition. I watch the VFX and it isn’t that bad at all. But the storytelling is as weak as the film’s villains. Somewhere in the first half, Vasanth Ravi’s character is droning on about superheroes and a woman interrupts: “Listen, don’t watch Hollywood films.” I won’t go as far to say it but maybe next time around while we pay attention to all the tropes and the common ideas in the superhero film template perhaps we will also pay attention to those honest, little moments of vulnerability that endear characters to us. Which is why after Endgame, when thinking about Tony Stark. We might forget all the fights he fought we might forget all weapons used but we will never forget him telling his daughter “I love you 3000.”
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