Empuran - Not a review

 Reviewing Empuraan is difficult. Though I won’t care to admit it, I had high expectations for the movie. Lucifer, though intended to be a commercial superstar film—usually high on style and low on substance—was a reasonably well-made movie. It had a solid story, its highs, and a good balance overall. The re-watchability of Lucifer is still high, you can sit through the entire movie without a problem. Since Empuraan is the next chapter in that universe, I was looking forward to it.

The first half mostly focused on building new characters, narrating Zyed’s backstory, and giving us insight into AK’s world. Some movies take a while to get into the groove and pull you in, but that never really happened for me, to be honest. I was constantly analyzing it rather than being immersed in it. Zyed’s backstory was well-made, but it felt like something I’ve seen too many times in the past decade.

Did you notice that foreign actors of Western ethnicity all look the same in Indian movies? With dead expressions, just delivering their out-of-place dialogues, they never seem to fit the role. Maybe we don’t have the budget to afford better actors from the West.

"The best trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist." But why is he trying to make others believe he is dead? So that Interpol, MI6, and other intelligence agencies stop hunting him? Maybe in the short run, that makes sense, but in the long run, what benefit does it serve? He won’t stop his operations, right? He will still continue to be Abram Khureshi. Now, every intelligence agency knows his face. So what was the point of it all? If it was about the Stephen angle, that still doesn’t make sense either—no one knew Stephen was AK. They could have simply convinced the world that Stephen was dead.

The second half worked better for me than the first. I felt more connected to it. However, my fellow moviegoers felt the opposite. The climax action sequence wasn’t impressive—it felt like a direct lift from a typical Telugu action movie. Nothing against Telugu movies! :-)

The background music was a letdown in most parts.

Lucifer felt more rooted. In Empuran if Mohanlal had more screen time as Stephen and less as AK, I would have liked it better. The scale is different this time—the movie is bigger and more expensive, catering to the needs of a Pan-India film. But somewhere in the process, they lost the soul of the first movie.

In the end, Empuraan was just a revenge story for Zyed. It didn’t feel like a true next chapter for Lucifer.