In retrospect, the 2020s will go down in the history of Tamil cinema as the era which gave a lot of work to stuntsmen and makeup artists. There’s more (fake) blood spilt for films now than the amount of writing ink. Bullets, guns, gore, blood, and excess violence are the way of Tamil cinema now. Lokesh Kanagaraj seems to have ushered in the trend with Vikram and the blood is spilling over everywhere. Adhik Ravichandran’s Mark Antony is keeping up with the trend. But it is getting boring now to see that one big machine gun appearing everywhere. Understandably, the hero walking in slow-mo carrying the machine gun and shells splattering everywhere was once cool and all, but it’s time it is termed redundant. And the machine guns are getting bigger with every movie and their phallic symbolisms are not subtle anymore.
Of course, nuance is not the strong suit of Adhik who made a name for himself in the industry with the adult comedy Trisha Illana Nayanthara. He comes across as someone who wants to make something eccentric and crazy. However, the problem is such odd films often happen but seldom get ‘made’. It is easy to conceive a story, but texturing it is another matter. While Adhik strives a lot to create this vibe for a unique retro-sci-fi-gangster-masala potboiler, all we get is a failed attempt with some great streaks of potential.
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The problem starts right at the beginning of the film, where Adhik lays down the rules for his world. It is camouflaged as the manual for the time-travelling telephone invented by Chiranjeevi (Selvaraghavan), a scientist in 1975 in Tamil Nadu. With the phone, one can speak to people in the past. But not the future, says the rule book. One can call to a date only once. All these rules are conveniently laid down, instead of being realised with the screenplay. If Adhik wants to get into the main story and get done with setups as fast as he can, he should have had some big convincing core for the viewer to forgive the lazy writing. There’s no such trade-off here. At the core, Mark Antony is about two gangsters Antony (Vishal) and Jackie Pandian (SJ Suryah). There’s then their arch nemesis Ekambaram (Sunil). On one unfortunate day in 1975, Antony is killed. In the present, Antony’s son Mark (Vishal again) grows up in the protection of Jackie. Mark hates his father for killing his mom (Abhinaya). He chooses to not get into violence and leads the life of a poor mechanic. However, when he gets hold of the telephone, everything about his dad seems to be in contrast to his perception of him. He has to now use the phone to rewrite his past to save both his mom and dad.
There are several contrivances, but that’s not the problem with Mark Antony. To be honest, the film doesn’t pretend to be some high-brow time-travel story. It uses the tropes of the sci-fi genre for a typical Tamil masala film. Yet, the problem is it fails to provide mindless entertainment, which seems to be its only objective. We don’t care about the flying cars, burning double-decker bus, or the CGI-created Silk Smitha who is inside. Even the violence fails to provide the catharsis or whatever it is supposed to. Everything is plastic, even the ‘mother sentiment’.
All said and done, Mark Antony is entertaining whenever SJ Suryah is on the screen. He is incredible both as Jackie Pandian and as his son Madhan Pandian. The ‘inter-timensional’ telephonic conversation between the father and son is probably the high point of the film. Once Suryah has performed a role, it is pretty hard to ascertain whether the character was written for him or he owned it. His performance is exaggerated, but still, it has soul to it. He is desperate and determined at the same time. Take him out of the film, Mark Antony will lack the little magic it has going for it. The movie could have been as good as SJ Suryah’s performance had Adhik prioritised writing over moments. The brilliance one can see in the fights and editing of Vijay Velukutty is absent in the screenplay, which gets treated as afterthoughts. In a bid to create theatre moments, the director seems to have written the story around them, failing to realise scenes are for the story. Not the other way around.
