Good Bad Ugly

Good Bad Ugly Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Ajith Kumar, Trisha Krishnan, Arjun Das, Sunil, Prabhu, Karthikeya Dev, Priya Prakash Varrier, Raghu Ram, Simran

Director: Adhik Ravichandran

What’s Good: Ajith Kumar’s fan following gets the expected bounties and applauds it all through, as seen during the screening.

What’s Bad: Nothing new in this action spectacle, but who cares?

Loo Break: Certainly not for Ajith Kumar fans!

Watch or Not?: Please do so for Ajith garu.

Language: Tamil

Available On: Theatrical release

Runtime: 140 Minutes

User Rating:

The lines between good and bad human beings are now blurring! In Sikandar, we saw a rich man forced into doing unlawful things and facing trouble. In Good Bad Ugly, we see a feared criminal, Red Dragon, a.k.a. AK (Ajith Kumar), who decides to leave crime after his son is born and surrenders to the law. However, his enemies do not allow him to live peacefully when he leaves jail.

AK was living in Mumbai (South-made films seemingly find Mumbai a good base location!) and is also lodged there in jail. His wife Ramya (Trisha Krishnan) moves to Spain with her son Vihaan (who grows up after 17 years to become Karthikeya Dev). She tells him the myth that his father, who he has never seen in person, lives in India as he is a very, very busy businessman.

Trouble looms when Vihaan goes missing. AK, who has been allowed to walk out of jail three months before his long jail sentence (there is confusion over whether he is in jail for 14 or 18 years) because he must be present at Vihaan’s 18th birthday, feels that his enemies have done the foul deed. Soon, Vihaan resurfaces as an arrested minor who has consumed as well as carried drugs and is thus being tried in court.

Now in Spain (never mind nitty-gritties like passports easily procured by those who have served jail for long), AK decides to go back to being the feared ‘Red Dragon’ and, with his trusted aide, Baby Tyson (Sunil), decides to get to the bottom of this conspiracy. Vihaan has been placed in juvenile detention as his trial is underway. Ramya naturally feels that all this is an act of revenge by AK’s enemies.

AK visits Vihaan, who explains whatever he remembers of how the whole thing happened, but after his girlfriend Nithya (Priya Prakash Varrier) was shot by gangsters who surrounded them, he is not clear about how things went. AK investigates and finds that an illegal gang called Dark Wolves is behind all this.

It is time now for AK to take the gang on, even as the Mumbai underworld kingpins warn Johnny, the chief of Dark Wolves, not to mess with AK. But the actual motive behind Johnny’s (and his twin Jammy’s) move against Vihaan is different from what it seems. It is revenge, but the cause lies elsewhere.

Good Bad Ugly Movie Review: Script Analysis

There are areas of congruence with Sikandar. When the story begins, the hero is a good man who is persistently harassed and provoked. He has a very loyal team and unlimited funding sources, as in that film. But there is happily no pretense at social messages here, except the broad, universal one that crime does not pay.

The script comes up with several fresh angles, like twin gangsters, not one as the world believes, and the love story of the (minor) son with a girl who questions him about his father’s long absence. The idea of a sentenced criminal having his own empire of loyalists in jail and the conversion of one of them into being a devotee of AK makes for innovative writing, as does the camaraderie shown between AK and the cops. The way Vihaan is always fooled into thinking that his father is traveling in a plane to work is also ingenious. The Mumbai criminals who are still active, for all their notoriety, are almost angelic in their devotion to AK, though they still break the law!

As always with such movies, including South-made action extravaganzas, the logic goes for a prolonged vacation, including during the action sequences. Ramya’s alternate anger and affection for her husband jars on occasion, and the script is made to make a lot of concessions to gimmicks and occasional flashbacks just to extol AK.

At an early point, AK is shown actually shredding (!!) his entire stock of weapons, but after that, it barely matters as he always possesses whatever he needs! The ease with which AK locates and attacks the main villains in a grimy car that can give a complex to 007’s armorer in terms of what it can do as a killer machine adds to the giant buffet spread of entertainment the film offers to devotees of Ajith Kumar in particular and action buffs in general.

Good Bad Ugly Movie Review: Star Performance

Swag, intensity, deep expressions—Ajith Kumar’s eponymous character has it all. He does not seriously need to act. But to his credit, there is no hamming or excessive stylized gimmicks. All this makes the actor’s skill at playing to the gallery noteworthy.

Trisha Krishnan looks like a watered-down version of vintage Amisha Patel and acts just passably. I liked Sunil as Baby Tyson and Prabhu as Jaiprakash. The rest of the cast does what is needed. In flimsy roles, length or depth-wise, Priya Prakash Varrier, Sayaji Shinde, Rahul Dev, Raghu Ram, Jackie Shroff, Tinnu Anand, Simran and Yogi Babu are all wasted.