Sardar 2 review: Karthi, SJ Suryah cannot salvage this tiresome sequel
An outdated, cliche-ridden film that has a far too long runtime.
The sequel to the hit 2022 Sardar, the film follows the same father-son narrative with Karthi reprising both roles.
If SJ Suryah were to be asked to identify and distinguish all the villains he has played in recent years, there’s a good chance the actor himself would struggle with the answer.
Suryah’s eccentric yet full-of-flair nature precedes him, but one reckons even he is feeling a tad bored at having to repeat himself over and over again. An outing like Jigarthanda Double X (2023) sticks out as an anomaly in his latest filmography, which capitalised on his bombastic and flamboyant charm to worthwhile results; all other remaining efforts have restricted him to playing a guy who is a gross derivative of the idea that SJ Suryah is.
In PS Mithran’s Sardar 2, he plays Yogi, a wounded mercenary who is feverishly looking for a bio-weapon named Doku. Yogi heads an outfit named Black Dagger that wants to proliferate a deadly virus among the masses so as to warn the future about the costs of popping too many antibiotics. This bizarre, as well as unintentionally comical, reason can perhaps only be justified by Suryah’s classic mercurial performance and Mithran summons his services for just that and nothing else. But even though the 58-year-old actor/filmmaker gladly exaggerates his way through the job, the film couldn’t be saved from the vast stack of cliches it rests on.
No intent to further franchise cause
The reason why the antagonist gets a special mention here is that the protagonist of Sardar 2 is barely the hero one seeks in such a film. The sequel to the hit 2022 film follows the same father-son schtick with Karthi reprising both roles and getting little that is new or novel to play with. The son, Vijay, is still in search of his much-mythologised father, ‘Sardar’ Chandra Bose, who he believes is still alive somewhere. The father, in parallel, still prefers to wait for that opportune moment to show up and save the day (and the country) from guys like Yogi. While Vijay asks almost nothing of Karthi as a performer, Sardar finds him lost beneath a kind of maquillage that makes the audience want to peel it off his face.
With that in the foreground, one cannot simply shake off the obligatory tone permeating Sardar 2, which seems to be put together without any of the pulp-fiction ambition of the first instalment. Sardar (2022) didn’t break any new ground in the espionage space, but it was undoubtedly crafted for a big-screen experience full of delicious conceits and popcorn thrills. There was a strong dose of melodrama and a believable — albeit over-the-top — sense of patriotism in the film that lent its two lead characters a bigger canvas. But Sardar 2 lacks any of the intent required to further the franchise cause.
It invokes a period setting (1980s), brings in a few ultra-daring R&AW agents and a hazardous weapon, an international mission or two, and calls it a day, without ever trying to give its story any context or personality.
Yet, a semblance of context emerges from the very pulp-fiction formula of its writing, which does crackle briefly in the first half. The screenplay written by Nambi kicks off on a rather lacklustre note with its modern-day spy shenanigans (rife with comedy routines, James Bond references and some gadgetry), but nevertheless finds a groove once a significant mission from the past is rolled out. A novice Sardar, sometime in the early 1980s, is tasked with extracting an antidote from Japanese hands and the fact that thousands of lives hinge on his success only makes the proceedings fun and riveting.
A long, bloated affair
Mithran sticks to his sappy, theatrical treatment for this portion that involves Sardar and his superior Zara (Malavika Mohanan) dealing with a menacing Japanese contingent, and all the contrivances here — from duping fearsome army troops to hijacking a plane — land quite well. The sentimentality doesn’t feel out of order, the rhythm of the storytelling packs an energy and one wishes the rest of the film would stay the course. However, Sardar 2 soon chooses to go off the rails, becoming a long, bloated affair that is neither exciting as an action vehicle nor particularly interesting in the ideas it wants to share.
What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase between Sardar/Viji and Yogi whose one-upmanship, while trying to get their respective hands on the hidden Doku, shows no end. Sardar 2 decides to make the bio-warfare conceit its fulcrum around the interval mark and figures that the only way to add any weight to its story is by sermonising about loosely researched tidbits on healthcare and brainwashing. It attempts to make Yogi a conscientious villain who has his goodwill misplaced, but the same villain has appeared a few too many times before in Tamil cinema. The writing never manages to make Yogi the thought-provoking figure that tests the protagonist’s own morality (despite a solid opportunity), so it instead renders him as a mindless, self-deprecating man who is running amok for no good effect.
At a nearly three-hour runtime, Sardar 2 is tiresome. It is evidently mounted on a big budget and has the services of an enterprising cast, but none of that could come in handy when the very conception of the film is off. Characters flutter in and out, locations change for not much reason, and vague espionage vocabulary gets used now and then to suggest something important at play. But if one were to pause any single person to confirm what’s really happening, it’s possible they wouldn’t be able to answer clearly. Best to leave it here, perhaps?
