Kingdom movie review: Vijay Devarakonda bleeds and broods in this emotionally distant epic

Indian Express

20 hours ago

Kingdom movie review: Without a doubt, Kingdom is a product of the current filmmaking environment. In the digital era, Indian filmmakers have increasingly grown fascinated with being enterprising and ambitious on the big screen, albeit by forgoing the narrative clarity that their predecessors valued. There's a palpable chase for glory around us right now that has come to define the modern theatrical experience as an escape, sans the sense of leisure one always sought from it. And in that very pursuit of dazzling us, Gowtam Tinnanuri's new film runs frantic and incoherent, and winds up a tad exhausted from the weight of its own ambition.
Those who remember the film's first-announcement poster will recall that the makers initially teased an intriguing espionage thriller. Themes of truth and betrayal dripped from the artwork that featured a shredded half-face of the film's leading man, Vijay Devarakonda, whose formidable look further piqued interest in the months that followed. The title Kingdom then set the stage for a tale that would potentially marry an epic, vivid cinematic vision with rugged, real-life-like intensity. The trailer enunciated the same, revealing a sprawling world full of drug cartels, violence, familial bonds and, of course, a strong undercurrent of emotional catharsis.
It would be unfair to suggest that the makers of Kingdom have misled their audience all along, because the resulting film contains just what was advertised. The story introduces us to Vijay Devarakonda's police constable Suri (this is some time post an ex-Indian prime minister's assassination), who is not only upright but also dogged in a way that's both self-damaging and inspiring. Suri seems less hassled by what his profession dictates and demands, and a lot more by a personal void left behind by his older brother Siva (Satyadev), who left home many years ago on the heels of a grave error. Devarakonda portrays Suri with a yearning that's heartfelt yet 'heroic', so it doesn't take us by surprise when the character, from out of nowhere, is tasked with going undercover and infiltrating an indigenous tribe in cahoots with a Sri Lankan weapon cartel. His superior (played by the ever dependable Manish Chaudhari) raises the personal stakes, while another thread ties Suri to a past and a culture that he must confront once again in the present.
Gowtam Tinnanuri does a fine job in setting up this portion of the story. His world's fantastical attributes are underplayed yet embellished by cinematographers Girish Gangadharan and Jomon T. John, who infuse a gritty texture into the visuals. The screenplay, too, stays taut (helped immensely by Naveen Nooli's editing) as it barrels through a load of information. Suri's assimilation into his new reality, the emergence of the deadly Lankan cartel and its own nitty-gritty politics, the tribe's (and Siva's) coerced involvement with the criminals, and their shared longing for poetic justice – these and many other details unfold with a matter-of-fact tone that keeps the narrative relentless yet largely gripping.
However, despite the painstaking setup, Kingdom never truly tethers us emotionally to its story. Though the film juggles many elements, it never settles on a central thread to bring them into harmony. If Siva and Suri's pensive relationship forms the foundation, another layer about Suri's deep-rooted connection with the suffering tribe puts forth a coming-of-age arc. The original strand of national duty and the associated moral ambiguities quickly loses prominence, while all the power-play that the cartel's prince Murugan (Venkitesh V.P. in an unnecessarily gory role) was involved in begins to lose steam as the narrative grows wayward. Bhagyashri Borse's character Dr. Anu is drowned out in this denseness, and almost every character feels lost in a material that doesn't do fair justice to anything it lays eyes on. Even the tribe, which is said to be inspired by the Srikakulam uprisings against British rule in the 1920s, is made to look exotic without any identifiable characteristics.
It could be said that Tinnanuri also errs in not exploring his protagonist's subjective point of view, and he instead opts to be detached from the proceedings. His writing doesn't concern itself with Suri's psychological complexity at any point, meaning that we do not get to know about his feverish journey unless it is stated out loud. The same goes for Satyadev's Siva, whose association with the tribe feels flimsy. Kingdom's essence has echoes of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as well as a potboiler like Yash Chopra's Deewar (1975), yet the Telugu film never finds its footing to take us deeper into its world.
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Much like Nag Ashwin's Kalki 2898 AD (2024), Kingdom boasts an originality that is now rare to find in big-ticket adventures. What also connects the two films is the lack of intimacy in their storytelling. In Kingdom's case, the opportunity to craft a profound tale is squandered when it engages neither the real-world realities and politics (Does the tribe indicate any kind of human subjugation we see around us? I doubt that.) nor the aspect of human desire and morality; an epic isn't just a spectacle after all, but also a document of what it is to be human. Gowtam Tinnanuri's film gestures at those explorations, but it doesn't commit to them, coming across as though it is unsure of the audience's intelligence. The result is a film with a beating heart, but still emotionally distant.
Kingdom movie cast: Vijay Deverakonda, Satyadev, Bhagyashri Borse
Kingdom movie director: Gowtam Tinnanuri
Kingdom movie rating: 2.5 stars