When you tune into a South Indian movie, you accept that you are signing up to watch a universe where one man has the capacity to beat up an army, a man who will bring a knife to a gunfight and still win. We also accept that the love story in any mass commercial pot boiler’ will come with a sexist undertone. The actress will have next to nothing to do. If their villain is a terrorist, he will be from a rival nation or belong to the religion that the majority loves to hate the most, and this feature goes beyond the South Indian film industry and well into the entirety of commercial Indian cinema, mostly. Since we have accepted that these will be the features of this movie anyway, we won’t criticize or talk about them. Let us start by looking at what “Beast” is about, and we will give our opinion later.
‘Beast’ Plot Summary: What is the story about?
“Beast” starts with a little girl chasing after her balloons. Veeraraghavan catches the balloons, but they end up bursting in his hand, which makes the girl cry. Veera buys her new balloons to make her stop crying, and she is very happy as she goes off to play. The girl’s mother is a street vendor in that area, and she asks Veera why he falls for her tricks every time. He replies, saying that it makes her happy and seeing the child happy makes him happy.
Just then, he gets a call from his superiors, who tell him that though a key informant has been nabbed, they currently don’t have the resources to nab their main target, Umar Farooq, so they would have to call off the operation. Veera disagrees, saying that it took him 3 months to set up the whole thing, and also assures them that he would take care of it. What follows is him taking down Umar Farooq’s henchmen around the area and getting a clear target on him. He checks with his team if the coast is clear for him to take his shot. His team notices that the little girl from before has ventured into that area by accident, but they don’t tell him that because they won’t be able to target Umar Farooq again if they lose this chance. So they lie to him that there are no civilians nearby. Vijay takes the shot, and as he checks the scene, he sees the two balloons that he had bought for the girl that day floating around. He goes ahead to see that the girl has died and understands that he has been betrayed by his agency.
Skip to 11 months later, and Veera is at his therapist’s, who is telling him that he has had to go to another therapist every time Veera comes to him. He lets him know that he has to start getting distracted as part of his therapy, so he must come to a wedding with him right now. We will not criticize the handling of PTSD and mental health here.
At the wedding, Veera meets Preethi, and it looks like she is certainly interested in him. As they are dancing together, Veera feels that he can hear the sound of a little girl crying, and he sees that a man is flinging his daughter up in the air and catching her again as some sort of fun game. Veera reacts to this by pushing away the man and safely catching the girl. Preethi asks him why he did that, and he replies that one should be careful in matters of children. She then straight-up asks him if he would like to marry her. He is shocked at her abruptness, but she explains that she does not have time as she has to get married in a month, and she doesn’t like her fiance. Veera agrees, and she asks him if he would like to work with her company. It is a security service provider that is about to lose its last contract with a mall due to the employees’ being incompetent security guards. The company owner immediately hires Veera, seeing his excellent combat skills. As the three of them make their way to the mall, Veera notices that the lift and the escalator are not working. Neither is the ATM or any of their phones. He starts suspecting something fishy and calls the emergency room, asking them to come to check up on the mall, but his phone gets disconnected.
In the middle of this, gunshots are fired, and the entire mall is taken hostage by terrorists. Vijay, Preethi, her boss, and his assistant sneak away to a safe place. Outside, we see that a minister who is in cohorts with the terrorists has joined the police in their rescue mission. The police have traced the identity of the person who called the emergency room and, with some technical support, managed to call Veera and ask him to help. They tell him that the terrorists have demanded that Umar Farooq be released, the same person during whose capture the little girl’s life was lost. Veera is caught between avoiding the whole thing and desperately trying to help. But he hears the sound of a little girl crying again and checks to see if a terrorist is trying to pull the girl out of her mother’s arms. He is prompted to take action, and he beheads the terrorist to rescue her. The terrorist’s head flies out the window of the mall and lands next to the police car, which gives the police the confidence that they can trust him to carry out the mission.
Veera’s next step is to capture another terrorist, but when he sees his son’s picture on his phone, he asks him why he is involved in this operation at all. The terrorist replies that he needs money for his son’s operation. Veera convinces him to help him instead. What follows is him killing all the terrorists who are guarding the hostages and joining them. As the other terrorists come to and question what happened to them, Veera, still acting as one of the hostages, offers to answer them. He is taken to their control room, where he sees their leader, who has a mask on. The leader thanks him for his help and exits the room for a second to threaten the police that they better not have sent anyone. The police told him that they had not.
‘Beast’ Ending Explained- Does Veera rescue the hostages? Does he capture Umar Farooq?
Back in the control room, Veera has killed the other two terrorists and when their leader comes back, captures him as well. He then sends out all of the hostages outside through one of the vents and takes the other vent to take out a bomb. Meanwhile, the leader has freed himself and taken back control of the hostages. The police have decided to let Veera take control of the situation. But the problem now is that the situation is out of the leader’s hands. He must gain back control of the mall to coerce the police to meet his demands.
One-half of the hostages are safely in a room with some of the terrorists tied up and the rest of them out to kill Veera. That’s when Veera gets a message from the walkie-talkie from the leader that he admits to having failed the mission and is ready to go back to his country without Umar Farooq. But he wants his men back first. They negotiate to let go of 30 civilians for 6 of the terrorists. After the exchange happens, the terrorist threatens to kill them all if Veera doesn’t surrender, to which he agrees. But he manages to free himself and takes back control of the situation, and kills the leader while exposing the corrupt minister. But Umar Farooq has already been freed, and he now wants Veera to be captured, dead or alive. But Veera manages to capture him back as well. “Beast” then ends with him partying with Preethi and the security company back on its feet.
Final Thoughts
We can tell that “Beast” tried. It wasn’t bad, but for the two and a half hours of its duration, it did not completely blow our minds. A lot of the jokes could have been done away with, not because they were bad, but because they saturated the whole thing. We did enjoy the story on the surface with a storm brewing underneath’ act pulled off by Vijay Thalapathy. Pooja Hegde was cute. The security service owner was our favorite character with all of his dry comments. But somewhere, within the stylization of “Beast,” it lacked some punch, and we felt its absence. Other than that, it was a strictly okay watch. Not bad, but just okay.
“Beast” is a 2022 Indian Drama Action film directed by Nelson Dilipkumar.
