Pandiya stabs Maya to distract Anbuselvan, and she dies. An enraged Anbuselvan tracks down Pandiya and brutally finishes him off. An epilogue shows that Anbuselvan, after the death of Maya, continued his job as an IPS officer some weeks later. An alternative ending was shot and placed in the DVD version with a running commentary by Gautham Menon, in which Maya comes alive and he explains why this ending was not used in the version for cinema release.
The film was initially titled as Paathi Half and then as Kalam , before the team opted to change the title to Kaakha Kaakha. The film consequently opened to high positive reviews from critics on the way to becoming another success for Menon, with critics labeling it as a 'career high film'.
Gautham Menon subsequently remade the film in Telugu for producer Venkata Raju and went on to claim that the new version was better than the previous version. In July , Menon also agreed terms to direct and produce another version of Kaakha Kaakha in Hindi with Sunny Deol in the lead role and revealed that the script was written five years ago with Deol in mind, but the film eventually failed to take off.
Menon and the original producer, Dhanu, also floated an idea of an English version with a Chechnyan backdrop, though talks with a potential collaboration with Ashok Amritraj collapsed. In addition to the following list of awards and nominations, prominent Indian film websites named Kaakha Kaakha one of the 10 best Tamil films of , with Rediff, Sify and Behindwoods all doing so.
The film was, before release, in 'most awaited' lists from film websites. Some recent films have even been made in Tamil and Hindi in parallel, with one film reportedly having the same scenes shot twice with two different casts :p Anyway, my exposure to Indian film has mostly been through Hindi cinema, and the two Tamil films I had previously seen Santoshi Sivan's "The Terrorist" and Mani Ratnam's "A Peck On The Cheek" seemed to confirm the notion that the films were more low-key artistic creations.
I picked up another Tamil film, Kaakha Khaaka, thinking that it was the original film from which the Hindi blockbuster Khakee originated. As it turns out, they are actually two quite different films, though there are more similarities than the name derived from the Khaki uniforms of the Indian police, I believe.
Kaakha Kaakha scotches the notion that Tamil films are all artsy and low budget though, being a full-blown blockbuster with plentiful action and song and dance scenes that would fit quite neatly into any Bollywood affair. I am pretty sure Khakee was influenced by Kaakha Kaakha, even though the stories are essentially quite different. Both are cops and criminals cat-and-mouse affairs filmed in a modern, "edgy" style with plenty of testosterone and quite a dark tone.
The influence of Ram Gopal Varma feels strong in them both, and the influence of Hollywood too it must be admitted. Kaakha Kaakha starts with a man crashing out of a lakeside house into the water, covered in blood, where he sinks to the bottom and has a musical dream about a beautiful girl. Upon the song's conclusion he regains consciousness and struggles out of the lake, and informs the viewer that despite being full of bullets he has to pull himself together and go rescue that girl.
The film then goes into flashback mode to fill in the story of who this man is and how he came to this situation. It's fully 2 hours before we return to this point in time, by which time we understand a lot more and have a lot more motivation to want him to pull himself together. The man is DCP Anbuselvan and he is a cop. He rose up the ranks of the Madras police force and together with a group of his colleagues became somewhat notorious for his tough methods in bringing down criminals.
Why go to all the cost of a court trial when a bullet can bring justice a lot quicker? The girl in his musical daydream is Maya, the woman who managed to get inside his stony heart. Obviously in 2 hours they go into quite a bit more detail than that, but I will leave that for the interested viewer to discover for his or her self ; Kaakha Kaakha serves up both a solid love story and a solid crime story, with the former dominating at first but giving way to the latter as time goes by. One of the nice things about the typically long running times of Indian films is that they can develop characters and plots in a lot more detail than the average minute action film could dream of, and in 2.
The ultimate collision of these two threads makes both all the more powerful. There definitely seems to be a move towards darker, grittier and more violent films in India in recent years, and Kaakha Kaakha continues this trend, taking the film to some pretty nasty places. This will undoubtedly upset some viewers, but it's all good with me. If you like your films to be feel-good and life-affirming, you probably don't need to read any more of this review 'cause you should know by now that this isn't a film for you.
Another factor that may turn off some viewers is that the film does seem to condone police violence well, murder to be blunt as a means of fighting crime. I was hoping that the film would explore the ethics of this viewpoint, and it seemed in many places that it was about to do so but then it never quite did.
I ended up sampling some bits of the director's commentary to see what he had to say on the matter, but it seems that he has no particular disagreement with the idea that killing criminals is a generally good approach to fighting crime. The film does seem like it provides some food for thought on the subject whether the director intended it or not though, as one can't help thinking that things might have gone better all round if the cops had actually arrested some of the people they "economically" dispatched.
Apart from this, the script for the film is generally very good - quite tight and logical, and full of nice bits of dialogue and detail that flesh out the principle characters well. Another benefit of the long length of Indian films is that they often give the villains more depth and development than the average Hollywood or Hong Kong crime film, making them equally important characters.
Kaakha Kaakha has a really great main villain, played with great charisma by young actor Jeevan. More amoral than immoral. The film features impressive production values for the most part, with very high technical skill.
However, the direction is a little self-indulgent. The film features the sort of "edgy" jump-cuts and roving cameras of Ram Gopal Varma's COMPANY, but here they seem to be applied without particular reason in many cases, drawing too much attention to themselves and detracting from what they are meant to be showing rather than enhancing it. The camera's excesses are amplified by the soundtrack, which is occasionally great but in too many cases is just too bombastic for the scene it belongs too.
A little more subtlety in the visuals and sound could have made the film a lot better. When it works, it works really well though. For most of it's running time the film is very tight, with no down-spots and confident direction. It engages the attention effortlessly, and I found myself very involved in the storyline. Unfortunately, the film flounders a bit at the end, with a climactic scene that doesn't really fit or offer a neat resolution not the very last scene, which is good, but the final showdown scene.
On the commentary track the director admits that he isn't happy with the scene either, but they ran out of time and money and couldn't shoot the scene he had planned. Well, maybe he will get chance when he helms the Hindi remake : Final thoughts - if you like gritty, dark crime films with a well developed love story then Kaakha Kaakha ought to please : It has a few flaws, but they're easily forgiven considering all the things the film does right - and it's certainly an entertaining ride.
The movie starts with a guy falling out of a window into the water, and then a song starts out of nowhere. I become alarmed but decide to put up with it for a little while and fast forward the song.
A group of policemen suddenly decide to go around and start shouting gangsters. There's a hand-to-hand combat scene in a barn where one punch sends the bad guy flying in the air several feet. This is when I stopped watching, which is about 10 minutes into the movie. You can save 10 minutes from being wasted in your life by not getting this far.
This movie sets an example how a cop story should be realistic and wonderful Most Powerful acting by Suriya and Jyothika which no one can do. Bengali launch.
Punjabi launch. Kannada launch. Carnatic launch. Hindustani launch. Sanskrit launch. Nirvana launch. World Music launch. Fusion launch. Marathi launch. Bhojpuri launch. Gujarati launch. Rajasthani launch. Haryanvi launch. Assamese launch. Odia launch. Malayalam launch. Bengali launch. Punjabi launch. Kannada launch. Carnatic launch.
Hindustani launch. Sanskrit launch. Nirvana launch. World Music launch. Fusion launch. Marathi launch. Bhojpuri launch.
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