It’s a late night in the early Nineties in Tamil Nadu’s Thiruverumbur. Even as everyone is settling into slumber, Karasaami (Dhanush) is perched on a tree, keeping watch on a locked house. When the time seems right, Kara and his apprentice (played by Prithvi Pandiarajan) break in. Just as they are about to seal the deal, they hear someone at the gate.

It’s the perfect start for a heist film – one in which the director wastes no time in the frills associated with regular commercial cinema fare. In fact, the protagonist appears within a couple of seconds of the film opening, a healthy sign that we are in for a pure genre film, rather than meander into formulaic elements. This sign strengthens with the introduction of DSP Bharathan (Suraj Venjaramoodu), who promises to close this case as soon as possible.

What Kara promises in the first 10 minutes is a grand cat-and-mouse game between a determined robber and an equally determined cop.

What Kara dishes out — after an overlong 161-minute runtime — is melodramatic fare that cannot make up its mind on what it wants to be.

This project stirred up quite some excitement among Tamil film circles because it saw the coming together of a talented actor (Dhanush) and a promising filmmaker (Vignesh Raja, who gave us the focussed Por Thozhil). But due to a formulaic treatment that prioritises emotion over subject, it ends up as a missed opportunity.

For what it is, Kara revolves around the vacillations inside the mind of a thief. He knows only one thing: how to steal. But he also wants redemption, which we understand when he and his wife Selli (Mamitha Baiju) are breaking their backs working in a hot kitchen in Renigunta, trying to build a new life, far away from the land that nurtured him. This quest leads him back to the village that he once ran away from... and there, he has to face his father (KS Ravikumar), with whom he does not share the best of relationships. What could have been a short trip turns out to be an emotional roller coaster and a nightmare — not just for Karasaami, but also for the unsuspecting audiences.

A quick look at Dhanush’s filmography is enough to prove that the actor’s movies have long milked the “appa amma” sentiment. Remember his equation with his mother in Vellai Illa Patadhari (VIP), or the equation with his father in Thanga Magan, or, more recently, his camaraderie with his father (Rajkiran) inIdli Kadai?This emotional hangover exists in plenty in Kara as well, with the entire first half devoted to showing what his father (played by KS Ravikumar) meant to him.

A better film would have packed all this into a couple of sequences and moved on, but Kara insists on hammering it down one’s throats. With such slow-burning drama-like fare going on, it is hard for one to buy into Karasaami’s real intentions. We are left confused whether he wants to be a good son to his parents or a good Samaritan, and this is one of the many thoughts that plagues us as we exit the cinema hall.

There are a few good moments when director Vignesh Raja sticks to his core heist premise. Take, for instance, a sequence set inside a bank when the robbers are on the prowl. A cop appears unannounced and immediately, Dhanush and his uncle Karunas have to think on their feet to escape this rather unpleasant situation . There is considerable tension in this well-staged and well-written sequence, enough to keep us on tenterhooks. There’s also a shade of grey in a certain character that takes you by surprise, but it’s rather unfortunate that the writers (Alfred Prakash and Vignesh Raja) let go of these core ideas and took a route that has little payoff in the end.

Music composer GV Prakash’s score has the right intention — you can catch it in the melodic soul of ‘Kannamma’ and ‘Ayya Ayya’ — but it puts you off as they are all placed in a film that is selling sentiment a tad too much. In the middle of all this is Suraj Venjaramoodu, who has little to do in a case that he can hardly solve, and Mamitha Baiju, Tamil cinema’s fast-rising leading lady, who gets one solid scene to score. And of course, Dhanush’s acting prowess — something that he has proved time and again — does shine at times. But after sitting through a 161-minute film that also involves bank loan scams and the Gulf War that led to fuel rationing, we are left to ask one pertinent question: Where is the pure genre film with a tight screenplay that Vignesh Raja promised us?

Kara is currently running in theatres