Surrender Movie Review: A messy attempt to connect way too many dots

Surrender has too many plot threads, and it does connect them all together at the end. Instead of knots, these several threads are taped together. With just days to go for the state assembly election, a celebrity’s personal gun gets lost in the care of a meek policeman named Periyasamy (Lal), gangster Kanagu (Sujith) must retrieve the lost money meant for election rigging or forego his political ambitions, and a trainee police named Pugazh (Tharshan) is caught in the middle of it all. If the film had just drawn a straight line between these three characters, it could have made for a compelling story. Instead, Periyasamy’s quest to save his job by retrieving the lost gun finds him in the ire of Kanagu’s brother, who is already desperate to prove himself. Kanagu’s quest to find his money leads him to cross paths with Pugazh, which in turn leads the trainee police to make contact with a mysterious gang who are out to kill Kanagu. Two entirely different characters, who are not part of the mysterious assassins, are betraying Kanagu. There is also an internal strife fuelled by jealousy and vengeance between the police officers. And suddenly, we get to hear the sob story of a single mother and her struggle to raise her kid. To top it all off, Munishkanth’s character and his crew slip in and out of the story, trying to buy illegal arms, and it doesn’t hit you until it's already late that his portions are supposed to be the old school ‘comedy tracks’. There are too many characters, too many plot threads, and far too many forcible attempts to make the dots connect. Surrender is a clocktower-sized mechanism, with hundreds of gears, all to switch on a single lightbulb.

Director: Gowthaman Ganapathy
Cast: Tharshan, Lal, Sujith, Munishkanth

The only moment that feels human is the dynamic between Pugazh and Periyasamy. Pugazh wants to save Periyasamy’s honour by retrieving the lost gun and save him from power-mad gangsters, all because he looks at him as a father figure. Pugazh’s emotional attachment is explained through a flimsy monologue where he talks about his own late father, but it still works because it feels like a choice made by a person instead of a character making a decision just for tying one plot thread to another. The reveal that Pugazh’s late father was also named Periyasamy reminds you of the infamous Batman v Superman moment where Batman gives up fighting Superman and helps him, after he finds out both their mothers are named Martha.

Pugazh’s character borrows every cinematic grammar made for a protagonist; every time someone is in trouble, he punches his way into the frame to save the day. So we naturally understand who the ‘hero’ of the story is. However, we don’t understand Pugazh apart from his surface-level moral code of ‘helping the good people’. Pugazh never changes or evolves through the course of the story, and we barely see him except when the film needs him for an action scene. All of these issues fade away when in one scene, Pugazh challenges the authority and refuses to follow orders that don’t align with his mission to save Periyasamy. If only the film had explored Pugazh’s rebellious anti-authoritative stance, where it comes from and how it changes him and the lives around him, Surrender could have been a much better film. Instead, we are forced to go through repeated attempts to sell how much of a ruthless, unstoppable gangster Kanagu is, which both the character and the actor are struggling to convey. Conversely, the best performance and character arc of the film comes from Periyasamy (played by Lal). We see Periyasamy’s meekness getting exploited and humiliated, and yet the character comes out steadfast in his moral conviction to hold on to righteousness and abstain from vengeance. Even as he is repeatedly bullied by the gangsters and his own colleagues, there is profound dignity to the way Lal portrays Periyasamy’s helplessness. 

Surrender spends inordinate amounts of effort to construct characters, scenes, and to connect plot points, and then creates another set of the same to justify the latter, and the cycle repeats in a messy loop. The film’s inability to identify its own core is perhaps best evident in its title, which points to neither the core themes nor to its protagonist, nor his values. It simply points to the inciting incident: A gun being surrendered to the police station on the eve of the election. Maybe there is more to it but we are not entirely sure and that is a problem as well. With focused script editing, some casting changes, and more confidence in its story, the film could have been a compelling action thriller, but what we get is an overlong demonstration of surrender to mediocrity.