“Beast,” a Kollywood (Tamil) star vehicle for Vijay, still feels different, if only for how vigorously its creators try to sell their lead as a 21st century renaissance man. Vijay (“Master”) can dance a little, drive a car through various glass surfaces, and also behead a terrorist and then chuck that guy’s disembodied head out of a tall window. To say nothing of the scene where Vijay puts on a set of roller blades and literally skates circles around a group of mask-wearing extremists.
Vijay’s all-things-for-everyone self-image is celebrated throughout, as in the chorus of one anthemic song that hails the chipmunk-cheeked hero as “leaner, meaner, stronger.” A concluding number also describes Vijay as a “multifaced tiger with a multifaceted avatar.” At this point in the movie, Vijay’s flying himself back from Pakistan in a borrowed military jet plane, having just independently massacred a terrorist encampment.
In “Beast,” Vijay plays Veera, a superhumanly resourceful former member of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence agency. Veera retired from RAW eleven years before the movie’s present day: in an introductory flashback, Veera unintentionally blows up a little girl with a rocket launcher. Look, there’s no way to make this plot sound less crazed than it is, so let’s have a paragraph break.
Ok, so Veera’s now extra-sensitive about kids, which explains why he only springs back into action after he, now working for a failing security company, hears the cries of distressed children after the ISIS-style ISS terrorists take over Chennai’s East Coast Mall. These terrorists are ruthless, as we can tell by the way that one of them back-hands a lady and traumatizes a crying girl. (among other things) ISS’s terrorists are led by Saif (Ankur Ajit Vikal), who spends most of the movie wearing a Latex mask that weirdly resembles Anton LaVey, and his traitorous accomplice, the Indian government’s unnamed Home Minister (Shaji Chen), as we see in an early scene.
The cartoonishly ruthless nature of Saif’s guys is a given. Or maybe it’s just not emphasized as often as Veera’s equally brutal counter-measures. There’s also nothing apologetic or conflicted about the violence in the movie, which is effectively played for kicks in a handful of action-intensive set pieces. In an early scene, Veera also slices off one masked villain’s arm by the elbow joint. And he stabs two ISS terrorists to death in front of a captive audience of mall hostages. Between murders, Veera plays dead in order to fake out his second victim. “This is all normal,” he tells the hostages after he knifes the second guy in the head. The crowd seems to believe Veera since, in a later scene, a very nervous civilian (prolific Tamil comedian Yogi Babu, of course) is beaten up by ISS’ terrorists, but refuses to snitch on Veera.