Hearing that the Indian Tamil-language flick Kaithi (2019) was a cross between Assault On Precinct 13 and The Wages Of Fear was enough to hook me into searching it out. What I found was something that is reminiscent of both those films, but was also pitched between a Johnnie To/Milky Way film (strong premise, tense build-up, impactful action) and Jerry Bruckheimer’s production of Con Air (ex-con wants to see his daughter, over-the-top theatrics, crunchy rock score).
The opening stretch sets up a lot of pieces between a successful drug bust kept secret, a vengeful gangster and his missing brother, a police celebration and alcohol tainted with tranquillisers. Eventually this results in a banged-up detective needing to transport a truck filled with incapacitated cops to a hospital for medical relief while hordes of gangsters have been sent with a hit-list of the five officers responsible for the bust. And then there’s the chained-up prisoner arrested for loitering, Dilli (Karthi), who is the only one that can drive that truck. He’s got a reason to make it through One Long Night – his daughter at a foster home – and he’s also got the skills to see it through – turns out his quiet dignified persona is a front for a brawler.
I was having a whale of time throughout Kaithi, which is thanks not only to Karthi’s grounded performance as the religious, weepy, salt of the earth prisoner, but also the array of characters running around, some working together to fight back against the encroaching villains. There’s the comic relief in the catering business who owns the truck, and joins the ride as the only one who can direct them through the off-road route. Or the diminutive country cop who falls asleep at a police station that becomes abandoned by the officers once they know gangsters are on the way to retrieve the confiscated drugs.
Structurally the film shifts between the stop-start journey of the truck as they keep getting ambushed by thugs, and the empty police station barricading themselves from an incoming siege. Directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj, and finding amber-tinted lighting for the fight sequences outside, and effective reversals to the twists and turns our beleaguered heroes find themselves in.
Available to stream on Amazon Prime.
VHS Tracking 