Kanguva review: A sincere Suriya navigates a whole lot of empty noise

Hidden somewhere in Kanguva is a message about the capability for forgiveness. A young boy forgiving a righteous tribal chieftain for snatching his childhood away from him. A man moved by a mother to forgive his own slayer. A father forgiving his son for placing a promise above his own family. But Siva’s tenth title is not a film concerned with the finer points of emotion. In its stride to be part of a line of mass-drenched historical epics, the film mistakes ambition in writing for ambition in visual scale. The result is a rushed, jarring piece of action cinema that we struggle to make any sense of.

It also doesn’t help that the film brings its crude reductionist sensibilities to every aspect of its writing. So, when it introduces bounty hunters Francis (Suriya) and Angela (Disha Patani) in present day Goa, men customarily ogle at women in bikinis, booze is free flowing, and everyone — including Kovai Sarala as Francis’s mother and KS Ravikumar as the cop who gives them work — speaks Tamil with an Anglo Indian accent. These portions come across almost like a glorified meme cut, spliced with viral meme sounds. 

It is hence not surprising that when the film goes back by almost a millennium to the year 1070, it applies similar sensibilities to depict the lives of tribes navigating clan wars. The tribespeople are shown to be clamorous, aggressive clans who live varying lives in five islands that are divided based on topography. Kanguva (Suriya) is the future king of Perumachi, one such island that’s populated by men and women who take pride in their hardy ability to stay loyal to their clan. When Roman emperors try to make inroads into India, they set their sights on the island.

For a film that’s ambition stretches far and wide from covering the Roman empire to the fictitious and dream-like quintet islands that envelope India, Kanguva gives little to no qualms about worldbuilding. Forget delving into their way of living, the makers think it’s sufficient to give us frivolous descriptions on all the islands. By the end of a perfunctory voiceover detailing these islands, we’re told that Perumachi is the “good” sept, and Arathi is the “evil” one. The latter is an ominous island (its ominousness validated only by the use of some red sand) headed by a man with a dead eye (a terribly underutilised Bobby Deol who only has one expression at his disposal). 

Whatever writing the film does manage to build naturally revolves only around Kanguva, who is played robustly by Suriya. When the film does give us a breather from its incessant fan-service, his relationship with Poruva, the child of a traitor he adopts, stands in for its emotional core. 

Even then, whatever little effort goes into establishing this relationship is immediately offset by disorienting cuts to exaggerated action set pieces that magically tie loose ends. A big moment involving Kanguva and Poruva’s faceoff in the film’s first half, for instance, is choppily cut with another big moment that’s very clearly meant to just be a template interval scene. Exchanges and fight sequences of any real stakes are hard to come by in Kanguva, and when they do — like with an action choreography involving the women of Perumachi — they don’t get the time or treatment to breathe. 

Whichever be the millennium, 2024 or 1070, Kanguva is largely a montage of hastily put-together scenes to DSP’s sparingly catchy but blaring score, which gradually go on to deafen the ears. The loudness is dispensed not just from the score, but characters who burst their vocal chords to depict any form of rage, and a screenplay that’s ironically unimaginative. In the middle of all this empty noise, there is no space for nuance in Kanguva. 

If there’s anything Sruthi loves more than watching films, it’s writing about it. Sruthi Ganapathy Raman’s words can also be read in Film Companion, Scroll.in, and The Times of India.

Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.