The ‘DoubleX’ in Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda DoubleX unexpectedly dawns on you once the film’s credits roll. The spiritual successor shares the same bones that made the director’s clever action film Jigarthanda (2014) stand tall. Like Jigarthanda, the sequel too follows a familiar yet inadvertent intertwining of two lives — a filmmaker (SJ Suryah) is forced to make a sour-faced Madurai rowdy (Raghava Lawrence) a venerated Tamil film hero of the 70s. The only difference here is that if Jigarthanda used cinema as a tool to express ideas of acceptance and second chances, Jigarthanda DoubleX, doubles down on the idea and goes a step further by making cinema a tool for revolt.
Laced With Cool Setups And Cooler Payoffs
Jigarthanda DoubleX is a goldmine of ironies — a playground that Subbaraj is more than familiar with. The first time we see Allius Caesar (Lawrence) explain his name to SJ Suryah’s Ray, we see him recount an absolutely ridiculous (or plausible? We’ll leave that for you to decide) memory: the time when Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood (and Allius’ idol) shot one of his spaghetti westerns at the Melakuyilkudi village of Madurai, and presented him with a new name and a handgun. But we soon realise that the gun isn’t a firearm, but actually a 8mm vintage handheld camera — a detail that gets a terrific payoff in the second half. Similarly, Subbaraj opens the film by showing us a power-hungry actor-politician (Shine Tom Chacko) in whose eyes, every film ticket counts as a vote. This gets a brilliant juxtaposition in the climax, when the actor’s same film has a radically different impact.
Subbaraj strews such tiny throwaway details for us to connect the dots in its first half, which eventually get their intended meaning in the last act. Much of its first half involves a whole lot of empty yet full-throttle fights and a comedic track with Sathyan and SJ Suryah (who call each other anna-maama and machaan-thambi for some reason). But what it ultimately achieves is pretty bare minimum as far as efficient world-building goes.