Of sequels and sothapals

There is a long standing belief in tamil movies that sequels of movies that were superhits usually tend to bring bad name to its illustrious predecessor and flop big time. There is always additional pressure on movies that are brought up as sequels right from day one because, they have to live up to the success of the previous version, which is the catalyst to its creation. The additional challenges being, how to make the already set storyline, revealed to the audience, more interesting and entertaining. It is like a magician trying to go one up on his trick after revealing his hand and it is never easy. The obvious weaknesses listed here are the potential pluses because of which the sequels garner more attention. The ease of relatability for the audience, time save in introducing the backstory for the characters, the familiarity of what happened previously which feeds on to the frenzy of what is coming next in the sequel are all the pluses which will become its own negatives if not handled correctly - like Indian 2.

That the first  part will become such a big hit, even the makers wouldn't have dreamt. It was a smashing hit nationwide and was a box office bonanza making director Shankar a household name. The movie had amazing songs, some rib tickling comic sequences, dollops of emotional and sentimental scenes and some interesting tit bits about the old man's character, right from his age to his writing style to his fighting methods and of course the prosthetic make up which was the talk of the town at that time. I remember how Raj TV won the telecast rights for this movie, beating serious competition from Sun and other channels only to play a 3 hour long movie as a day long one with ads running for as much time as the movie itself!! Some of the highlights of that movie that were solely missed or believed to have been the reason for the failure being the quality of dialogues. Sujatha and Balakumaran who were the two pillars on whom Shankar built his initial movie empire were both absent (dead) and their contributions or their lack of it has been visible on Shankar's previous movies itself. If you take the entire story of "Indian" first part, it can be stuffed in a single dialogue that - in other countries people take bribes to  skip their duties while here we have to pay bribe for people to perform their duty. 

Personally i felt, the second part for this movie had no justification to be made at all, for the previous version was well rounded and complete, leaving hardly any scope for building further. Whatever were the novel elements ten fifteen years back, had been milked dry in this version and none of them are organically placed in the movie. The fact that they have a third part lined up, clearly tells that this one was an accident that escaped editing table for the simple reason that, the movie was 5 years in the making and the production house would've wanted to recover some portion of the cost at least before they go bankrupt. Almost the entire second of this movie could've been cut off and whatever they've planned for the next part could've been inserted without altering the story line any further. It might've made the movie as close to the original's running time, but might've saved several audience from running away from the movie. In an industry which measure careers mostly by the immediate and continuous successes given by the creator, Shankar might've overplayed his hand with his past few movies. Already touted as a director who burns his producers wealth to dust just for his adamant wishes, he would be hard pressed for resources for his upcoming movies.

I happened to see one another movie which was a sequel, again, with not so much glam, either about itself or about its predecessor. The movie was "Haseen dilruba" and its sequel being "Phir aaye haseen dilruba". I guess both of them were strictly OTT releases and on Netflix. The first part literally felt like a hindi novel on screen, interesting part being the innumerable references to a novelist and his creations all throughout the movie. The second part starts right were the former ends and for the whole of first half , to be honest, it was intriguing. The write up was pretty decent and the situations were interesting. The second half was such a huge letdown that it felt as if written by a different author!! The ending couldn't save the movie and eventually they managed to mess up on all the good will(!!) generated by the former.

No wonder they say, sequels are cursed, for its far easier to create something from scratch rather than living up to the success of something, albeit its own former self!