Here’s all you need to know about the newly released films — Dude, Thamma, and Bison

When Cameron Crowe first asked John Cusack to hold up the boom box in Say Anything, the actor was uncomfortable with the idea. He thought it would make him a wuss. It was only after much convincing that Cusack lifted the boom box on the last day of the shoot with an angry, defiant expression—and that was the take that made it to the movie, with Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes underlining what is today an iconic moment in pop culture history.

Heroes traditionally have felt shy of playing soft. It’s not alpha enough for their idea of a hero. Maybe that’s why Pradeep Ranganathan, despite his fair share of haters—which will only go up if he keeps up his poor-cousin variant of Dhanush, who himself is a poor-cousin variant of Rajinikanth, with mannerisms that are a copy of a copy—is still watchable.

But to his credit, Pradeep works despite all his cringiness, wannabeness, and lack of originality because he is not afraid to be vulnerable on screen. Every time a character in his movies slaps him or spits at him, we feel represented, because he plays the most despicable of incels—be it the sexist hypocrite who has more dirt on his phone than he judges his girlfriend for in Love Today, or the obnoxious, cigarette-chain-smoking Dragon, or now, the Dude who gate-crashes his ex’s wedding to know why she dumped him!

If Rajinikanth is Superstar and Dhanush is self-proclaimed soup boy, Pradeep has made Supreme Soup Boy his brand. He’s willing to play the scum—representing the worst of male behavior—to show that even they have a shot at redemption.

It’s a step forward for Tamil hero types for sure, but all the progressiveness in Dude is, at best, surface-level, because Pradeep plays the softboi with aggressive male toxic energy—be it the snap of his fingers or a slap across the girl’s face. The kind of softboi who feels entitled to an award or another heroine by the end for doing the bare minimum decent thing. The “donkey who does not know the smell of camphor,” or the slowboi.

Or maybe it’s 26-year-old director Keerthiswaran’s inexperience in handling tricky terrain. Dude is a frustrating film because it’s great and full of promise for over half its runtime, as it keeps stacking up conflicts and themes, only to be undone by the weight of it all in the final act, when the film collapses in the last half-hour trying to tie up all loose ends. While it’s commendable that the young storyteller does not want the girl to regress back to her childhood love, the story offers very little for us to see why she chooses the men she does.

The messiness of romance or honor killings cannot be tidied up neatly with a ribbon. If the idea was to show female agency, the film could have had her have a baby with one guy and end up with another. But this is still all too patriarchal, where an accidental pregnancy seals her choice of partner. This is a rom-com that needed the female perspective but is happy being the flawed Dude perspective on things.

Dead on Arrival

Ayushmann Khurrana has made a career of playing the vulnerable softboi, and in Maddock’s Thamma, which tries to expand its Stree franchise to include vampires, the vegetarian softboi is bitten, brought back to life by love, and becomes a post-human Betal.

And just like that, the heroine with superpowers, Tadaka (played by Rashmika), is relegated to playing his supporting girlfriend in the second half because the makers—who started off with feminist themes in Stree—have regressed back to the Chosen One template in poor taste. There’s no redeeming quality in the hero that makes us feel he deserves to be a superhero.

The writing is as detailed as Varun Dhawan’s wardrobe in his post-Bhediya transformation cameos—barely enough to nonexistent to cover its back.

Considering we just saw a much superior Lokah in the same genre, this low-resolution script version is best skipped and caught on OTT if you are ever that bored.

The Softboi Fighter

Dhruv Vikram really comes of age in Mari Selvaraj’s Bison, where an underdog softboi whose world singularly revolves around his love for kabaddi has to fight his way out of situations by avoiding violence—that’s only second nature to the world he inhabits. A world where othering is a way of life and seeds of division are sown in the minds of the young through the language of violence.

This is a film where sport transcends differences and divides that are decades old, and all characters, no matter how evil, are shaded with humanity—except maybe the naysayer coach, the stand-in for the broken Indian sports system.

This is a film where the older girl (played by Anupama Parameswaran) decides who she wants, and the sister fights for the brother, while the men in the world are fighting with knives.

A film that truly makes us root for the softboi.

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