Measuring up to the aspiration that the film’s title spells out is by all reckoning a tough ask. Superstar Vijay, as is his wont, does not baulk at the challenge. He goes all out to embody what his fans believe him to be and manages to land on his feet at the end of the formulaic exercise.
Diving into the project in a father-and-son dual role, Vijay carries The Greatest of All Time, patchy at the best of times, on his shoulders. He navigates the hurdles that are inevitable in a film as over-plotted as this with customary flair, if not with consistent success.
Director and co-writer Venkat Prabhu weaves the film around the semi-retirement leitmotif that Vijay has employed in a few of his recent releases (Beast, Leo). The hero comes out of years of living in the shadows and returns to the thick of the action.
Amid a whole bunch of deadpan throwbacks to the megastar’s own films and stray nods to other Tamil movies and songs that place him in the larger context of mass cinema history, The Greatest of All Time perhaps contains a meta-allusion to the upcoming end of the Vijay acting career in preparation for a plunge into full-time politics.
The Greatest of All Time seeks to extend Vijay’s uninterrupted run of box-office successes – a string of nine blockbusters has made him Indian cinema’s most bankable actor. The film has everything that his fans crave. What it could have done with is a more original script.
The film juggles with themes that have been done to death – friendship, loyalty, betrayal, guilt and redemption – and culminates in a long-drawn-out climax that pits two personas of the actor against each other. Beyond the parameters of the fictional narrative, one could interpret the confrontation as one between a generation gone by and an era carrying a baggage that blurs the line between good and bad, between sense of duty and the need for self-preservation and vengeance.
Vijay plays M.S. Gandhi – note that the initials aren’t MK, but MS. The Dhoni parallel comes to the fore in the film’s climax, which corresponds with a make-or-break last over of an Indian Premier League knockout fixture at a packed-to-the-rafters Chepauk.
Gandhi – peace isn’t his primary weapon, righteousness is – leads a quartet of secret agents who work for the Special Anti-Terror Squad (SATS), a Chennai-based unit of RAW. He is the MSD of Indian espionage – a great finisher no matter how badly he starts.
That is true of the film, too. The Greatest of All Time opens with a bang all right but loses its way somewhat through the rest of the first half as it seeks to achieve a balance between the hero’s innate bellicosity and familial responsibilities.
As he himself suggests, he has two bosses, one at the workplace, a rock-steady SATS chief Nazeer (Jayaram), and another at home, his wife Anusuya (Sneha). He gets into trouble far more with the latter than the former.
After a series of crucial reveals and a string of killings by a duplicitous young man who surfaces from Gandhi’s past, The Greatest of All Time makes it way to an unoriginal finale that is salvaged somewhat by the flair with which it is mounted and filmed. Cinematographer Siddhartha Nuni and editor and Venkat Raajen deserve a mention here.
A devastating bomb blast is only a press of a button away. Gandhi, trained never to flinch, is determined to demonstrate who the GOAT is. He swings into action as thousands of innocent lives hang in the balance.
The team – Gandhi works alongside Kalyan Sundaram (Prabhu Deva), Sunil Thiagarajan (Prasanth) and Ajay (Ajmal Ameer) – is sent on a sensitive mission to Kenya. They waylay a train carrying weapons-grade uranium meant for a terrorist outfit. In the heat of the moment, they end of exceeding their brief.
The ill-advised overreach – it does not yield the desired result – returns to haunt Gandhi, his wife and their five-year-old son Jeevan (Akhil) – and his SATS associates. In the lead-up to the intermission, Gandhi and his boss are drawn into a violent clash with a man who hides his face behind a crash helmet that has ‘Devil’ written under the visor.
The remainder of The Greatest of All Time hinges on a renegade secret agent (who has a massive axe to grind and lets loose unending bedlam) and sundry other traitors and prodigals who push the protagonist and his men to the end of their tether.
The film is at times a touch exhausting because it is overlong. However, the action sequences and plot twists are judiciously spaced out over a three-hour runtime. So, none of them is unduly out of place. Wish one could say the same about the songs (composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja). They not only slow down the film but also stretch it out unconscionably.
The director, on his part, appears to be aware of the effect that the musical numbers are likely to have on the pace of the film. In a sequence that follows the cold-blooded murder of a government official, the perpetrator uses his romantic interest (Meenakshi Chaudhary) as a means to shake off the pursuer. Is this what you called me here for, the lady asks. No, (I called you here) for a song, the man replies.
In a thriller such as this, action is the principal currency. Every song isn’t music to the ear. Similarly, not every attempt that the film makes to inject humour into the proceedings bears fruit.
Yogi Babu is thrown in as a man who is in possession of a stolen mobile phone that contains crucial secrets. Taking off from the name of the hero, Nehru and Bose are evoked by the sub-plot to shore up a stretch of the film that does not quite add up.
Vijay, fleshing out two distinct characters, one greying and steely, the other callow and obdurate, and both carrying scars past events, makes up for whatever the film lacks in terms of logic and flow.
That is the sort of rescue act that he has pulled off so often this millennium that it has stopped surprising his critics. His fans, of course, will find no reason to feel shortchanged with what The Greatest of All Time in generous proportions.
