

The highly hyped-up Katana sword is put to terrific effect here with dozens of glorious kills in the second half. It is a concerned father warning his son about the repercussions of the grave mistake the latter has committed in both films. The reveal about the origin of Vikram’s sobriquet, 'The Ghost’ is strongly reminiscent of the Babayaga story from John Wick (2014). When the film eventually enters the action zone in the final 35 minutes, it is entertaining, despite lacking inventiveness. These portions of the film make you restless to see the action we signed up for. I would be lying if I say I wasn’t reminded of Trivikram’s recent films where the conflict is all about shares and stocks in a company. The conflict is not just bad guys after their lives but boardroom politics too.

We hope to see Vikram hunt down thugs of the underworld in style, but before we get to that, we have to sit through a painfully long and generic set-up that features the protagonist double up as a guardian for his sister-like Anu (Gul Panag) and her reckless daughter Adithi (Anika Surendran). This, I believe, is the biggest problem with the film: its refusal to focus on the amusement-violence and action-and insistence to meander on a rather generic plotline for an excessive runtime. What happened to Vikram’s rage and the mission he set out on? When the film’s title appears, we are brimming with excitement, but the pleasure is only momentary with our curiosity being put to rest almost immediately with a text, ‘5 years later’. It starts with an uninspiring chase and ends with a tragedy, propelling Vikram to take down the whole underworld.

The actual action begins-or you think so-after the song when Vikram and Priya are on a mission to rescue a kid from a bunch of kidnappers. It is a bit jarring and it assures you to gain momentum. They take down the last man and instantaneously begin kissing as the action sequence segues into a romantic montage song that plants information about Vikram’s struggles with trauma and his dear relationship with his adopted family. He is joined by Priya (Sonal Chouhan) and together they wipe the hell out of the bad guys. Nagarjuna plays an Interpol officer named Vikram (his first film in 1986 was named Vikram, allow me to remind you) and he is introduced in an Arabian desert, taking down a battalion of a suspicious, unnamed group of militants.
