Here's what Coolie and War 2 could learn from Sholay

The Hindu

a day ago

Two huge films, with hundreds of crores riding on them, clashed on a rainy Thursday morning as I braced myself for the big-screen battle before sunrise. I made it to a 6am show in Andheri because there's no better feeling than watching a full house Rajinikanth film first day, first show. Coolie, directed by crowd favourite Lokesh Kanagaraj, was released on the occasion of the superstar completing 50 years since he pushed open the gate in style in Apoorva Raagangal, a 1975 Tamil-language romantic film.
The hype was massive — second only to the Kamal Haasan-Mani Ratnam-AR Rahman combo Thug Life.
And the morning played out like déjà vu. Not just because we'd been disappointed weeks ago, but because we'd seen the same beats in either a Rajinikanth movie or a Lokesh movie.
Like Thug Life, Coolie is built for a pan-India audience to make Tamil cinema proud. But how do you achieve greatness by walking the same paths?
The fatigue shows, the storytelling so derivative, you wouldn't be surprised if ChatGPT wrote it.
No details, all vibes — Anirudh carries most of the load, the music telling us all we need to know. The stars do TikTok reels to it, and Rajinism is reduced to rolling a cigarette across his tongue or drinking alcohol. Since the superstar stopped acting at the turn of the century and Baba bombed, directors wrote Rajini-template scripts for younger stars like Vijay and Ajith, who kept the same tropes alive.
A duplicate of the Rajinikanth brand with a substitute star became the formula. Coolie feels like a duplicate of a duplicate — loud strokes, blurry details. Who is Preethi's (Shruti Haasan) mother? Doesn't matter. Alright, who exactly is our hero? Again, doesn't matter. Lokesh assumes we've known him for 50 years and that what we miss most is how he smoked and drank with style. That's the fanboy fantasy here — Lokesh using tech to show us the 'baddy' side of the grandfather of Tamil cinema. Lokesh's screenwriting is the biggest casualty of his escalating scale. His scripts have gone from great (Maanagaram), to good (Kaithi), to middling (Vikram), to bad (Leo), to worse (Coolie).
The micro details, the ironies, the nuance — all sacrificed at the altar of the star. Storytelling feels post-story now: all tales told, the man is old, so let's just vibe to him and the music.
Adhik Ravichandran's recent Ajith starrer Good Bad Ugly does the same but without pretending to have surprises, which Lokesh promised. The only surprise was there was no surprise. Just a Rajini movie for the ADHD times.
No winners in this war
War 2 doesn't disappoint as much because the trailers already told us what to expect — Hrithik Roshan in salt and pepper, ogled through a homoerotic male gaze, men stabbing each other with sharp objects, including kebab skewers. It's good-versus-bad cosplay on green screens, thrills VFXed in. Beautiful people dressed for a Spanish holiday for Insta reels, doing Tom Cruise stunts because it's the YRF Spyverse — where Tiger, Pathaan, and Kabir might meet for kebabs in a mid-credit scene.
But it's hard to stay till the end, after three hours of pretty wallpaper action. Same plot as the last one — hero suspected rogue, hunted by the other hero, they share a past, twist — they fight.
We can only hope unimaginative big films bomb so producers think twice before gambling ₹400 crore.
Back to the OG
Sholay, now 50, knew the stakes had to be insurmountable — hence more than one hero, a clear goal, and the most exhilarating route to it.
We meet a crazy bunch of characters, speaking in punchlines. Ramesh Sippy, along with Salim–Javed, gave Indian cinema its denims, doffing the hat to the American western while making it quintessentially Bollywood: clever, funny dialogues alternating between drama, comedy and music.
The reason it worked? It tried a new path. Inspired in parts, yes — but Sholay wasn't about where it came from, it was about where it took us. It took us to Ramgarh. It took us to the movies.
Make movies great again. May the duplicates bomb, and bomb big.
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