Oh, and -by-the-way- now I know martial arts. This happened. A gang leader survived a bullet, an assassination attempt, an avalanche, slide into a Tibetan monastery, and emerged like a groundhog two years later to announce it was time for a comeback, oh and now I know martial arts.
Wouldn’t it be great if life actually worked like that? And, what, no montage? Did you think that taut 165-minute runtime couldn’t be pared any further? Because, let me assure you, it could. It could have been pared a great deal more than that.
The real problem here, however, is that the film lost the plot. And it lost the plot with such gusto and irrelevance that the audience might have forgotten what the plot actually was. So let me remind you, Thug Life, of where you started and where you went:
There’s a street war in Delhi, 1994. In the crossfire, two children become orphans immediately. The elder one, Amaran (Silambarasan TR as an adult; but at this poi t int he narrative, he’s a child played by -as far as I can tell- nobody), becomes a shield for gang lord Sakthivel (Kamal Haasan, who also co-wrote the film). In the aftermath, Sakthivel makes Amaran his apprentice thug, yet after hearing the child’s POV, vows to find Amaran’s sister no matter what it takes.
Naturally, I’m imagining this thugfather and new son awaiting the end of the initial street battle, and marching up and down the ravaged neighborhoods of Old Delhi looking for a 
little girl. How far could she have gotten? Did you try looking for her at, you know, her home?
No, that didn’t happen. The next scene is 22 years later and, in the meantime, Sakthivel and Amaran have spent about as much time looking for Amaran’s sister as your average married man looks for a pair of dress socks. What is going on, however, is that Amaran is now an adult and loyalties may have shifted in the interim. A young woman’s suicide (because her fella was a playah) triggers unnecessary violence for the entire rest of the film.
It is well after two hours of runtime later that Thug Life suddenly remembers Amaran had a sister. Why thank you film. I was so busy not caring about who was shooting at whom to care about the only plot point worth remembering. This film has an idea of what it wanted to be, but was several rewrites away from polished. How about this rewrite: Sakthivel realizing he’s used the boy Amaran as a human shield to save his own life in the initial gang war, vows to give up his Thug Life and go straight and narrow … however, when Amaran’s sister is discovered to be taken by a rival gang, he must once again assume the Thug Life he vowed to shield Amaran from? There. A much more condensed story that can have all the violent elements you want, but adds a depth of character, too. We can even fade out on a dying Sakthivel having saved the sister but acquired a fatal wound in the process pleading with Amaran not to follow his path and a final shot of teenage Amaran considering his own future.
Now isn’t that a much better film? Don’t answer. It is.
There once was a Thug, Amaran
Whose childhood ended before it began
Losing sister to the street
He felt incomplete
And grew up to be a lawless man
Not Rated, 165 Minutes
Director: Mani Ratnam
Writer: Kamal Haasan, Mani Ratnam
Genre: Random people using deadly force for … reasons
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: I dunno … thugs?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “You lost the plot. You lost the *only* plot”
