One can sit through something as intolerable as Kattalan only if one can invent some distraction. A possible diversion could be to keep a count of the humans and elephants killed during the film’s two-hour duration. But halfway through, you are bound to lose track as the killings are just too many, even in a single sequence, to get an accurate number. In the end, one realises that the biggest casualty of this relentless assault on the senses is neither humans nor elephants, but cinema itself.

The dishonesty of it all is evident in how it treats its characters. To fill the emotional void at the centre of the film, one or two characters, like a physically challenged young girl, are introduced randomly and immediately turned into victims of some violent act, which would then set off some pathos-inducing background score. The writers are clearly not interested in these characters. They are deliberately using them for the film’s emotional impact and to underscore the need for revenge.

It is not surprising, for Kattalan belongs to the same universe as Marco, perhaps one of the most violent films ever made in Malayalam. Violence, in this universe, is an end in itself. Situations are created to unleash maximum violence, which is piled on until we are desensitised enough to stop caring. The action choreography itself, despite the presence of an acclaimed team, is not aesthetic enough to write home about. It is one jangled mess of dislocated limbs and splattered brains, much of it filmed too fast to make any sense of who is fighting whom. The scenes involving a few machine gun-toting kids and sequences of children watching approvingly as the elders unleash violence make one wonder about the thought process that went into the making of the film.

All that action and violence is built around a very basic story that has already been seen in countless films, although the treatment shows that the makers had ‘pan-India’ ambitions like Pushpa and KGF. An entire village deep in the forest is under the rule of Maari (Sunil), a feared ivory smuggler, who unleashes wanton violence on the hapless villagers who also work for him. When another gang attempts to scuttle his business and capture the cartel, he enlists the help of Anthony (Anthony Varghese), a man adept at smuggling stuff even through tightly controlled borders.

ALSO READ: Actor Indrans credits RJ Balaji for helping him overcome apprehensions in ‘Karuppu’

Debutant director Paul George appears to have been given the task of expanding the Marco universe by its production team, the ever-expanding “universes” now being one of the bane of most industries. Although the names of three writers, including the director, are listed, the film does not seem to have a screenplay long enough to fill a page. Much of the cast delivers dialogues by Unni R as if they are reading a textbook.

Ravi Basrur splits the eardrums with his brand of loud, unimaginative jingle-jangle that passes for background score these days. The cold commercial calculations behind this project are evident in how popular influencers pop up one after the other just to show their faces and draw cheers from their respective “fanbases”. Most of them don’t even have a line of dialogue. The three post-credit sequences, including an AI-generated one, threaten to expand the agonising universe in the coming years.

Kattalan is currently in theatres