A few days before the release of L2: Empuraan, actor/director Prithviraj Sukumaran was asked in a press conference about how Malayalam films banked on content for their acclaim/success, and if his film would follow suit. Given that the film was a sequel to the 2019 hit Lucifer, Mohanlal’s bid for a globe-trotting, convoluted spy thriller fused with a homegrown tale of political succession, the condescending tone of the question addressing the sequel wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
And thus, Sukumaran stepped in to say it was still ‘content’ that had dictated the making of L2; only the content was expensive to shoot. When I saw this clip two days before the film’s release, I fobbed it aside as another one of those empty promises made during a marketing campaign. But only two days later, I found out that the film was being targetted by right-wing forces.
This is going to be a challenging review to write because L2: Empuraan is barely a competent film. Inheriting the vague world-building of the first film, Sukumaran’s film is everywhere and nowhere. One of the two primary plotlines takes place in Kerala around its local politics, while the other takes place between Senegal, London, Iraq and Berlin.
The thread connecting the two plot-lines is a character called Stephen Nedumpally/Khureshi Abram (played by Mohanlal) – who is a Kerala state politician and also a key figure in an Indo-Arab international crime nexus. Why does a figure like this have such keen interest in the state politics of Kerala? No one knows. It’s a connection that remains translucent even by the end of the second film.
However, the sequel does go beyond its blockbuster template – the reason why it has riled up such emotion in the first place. It begins in 2002. As people watching Hindi films on a weekly basis will tell you, this is incredibly rare. The last Hindi film to have a level-headed depiction of the 2002 Godhra riots was Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che! (2013).
Recent attempts like Accident or Conspiracy: Godhra (2024) and The Sabarmati Report (2024) fixate on the burning of Sabarmati Express, the incident that supposedly triggered the riots, and say little of the riots themselves. Both the 2024 films were widely admonished for trying to revise the narrative around Godhra pogrom, where nearly three-quarters of the official death toll were found to be Muslim civilians.
A film that depicts the horrors of the 2002 Gujarat riots
Since the BJP government has come to power – the Godhra riots have been a no-go for most films, unless in films like the PM Narendra Modi biopic, which have the endorsement of the BJP government. It’s where Sukumaran’s film scores over all the releases in the last decade.
In a deeply upsetting opening sequence, we see a group of Muslims fleeing a town in Gujarat, seeking refuge in the home of a Hindu woman. Even within the blockbuster temperament of the film, Sukumaran really commits to showcasing the barbarity unleashed around the time. For example: a young Muslim man speaking on the phone is bludgeoned to death using a steel rod. We never fully see the act, but the sound effects capture the ruthless manner in which the Hindus were ‘allowed to vent’.
Later, we see the Hindu woman’s home being ambushed by a mob led by Balraj (Abhimanyu Singh), later called Baba Bajrangi. This is a not-so-subtle indication to Babu Bajrangi, one of the accused in the Naroda Patiya massacre, where reportedly 97 people were killed. It uses chilling details from the accounts of the massacre, where pregnant women were raped, and their abdomens were cut open with sword.
Sukumaran doesn’t go as far, but he does manage to show the sheer impunity with which a mob acted. Also, how its mastermind goes on to become a powerful politician making inroads into the state of Kerala, 20 years later.
For this 20-minute stretch, Sukumaran’s film remains true to what he promised in that press conference – and one can see glimpses of what he was trying to achieve in this star vehicle. The premise of a saffron party trying to take control of Kerala (a state where the BJP infamously won their first Lok Sabha seat in 2024) by poaching the twisted, ambitious scion, Jathin Das (Tovino Thomas – guzzling a lot of on-the-rocks whiskey, and walking like Kendall Roy) of the communist powerhouse party, is an interesting one.
To its credit, it doesn’t paint the communist party in an idealistic vein either – which is hardly the kind of nuance one expects from a broad-stroked blockbuster. But this on-paper intrigue never makes for compelling cinema.
Unlike the early ‘Gujarat’ portion – the rest of the film simply coasts along. How does Mohanlal’s character fit into Kerala’s state politics, as he negotiates with African drug cartels and continues to evade international spy agencies? As Baba Bajrangi’s saffron party encroaches upon one of the last bastions of democracy, the communist party desperately seeks a replacement for Jathin – in his sister, Priyamvada (Manju Warrier).
Will a weak communist party be able to withstand the might of the saffron party that employs central agencies to arrest rival politicians? For a blockbuster, it’s brave of Sukumaran to drop hints about his awareness of the real world.
But L2: Empuraan is also made to actively feed the attention deficit of an audience, who might switch on their phone if ‘nothing happens’ for too long. Which results in the film bizarrely cutting between the grounded political intrigue in Kerala to the vulgar action set-pieces synonymous with Lyca productions (also seen recently in Indian 2, Vettaiyan, Vidaamuyarchi). Mohanlal flits in and out of the film in slow-motion, wearing trench-coats, sunglasses, twirling his moustache, and speaks with the pauses of someone reading speeches off a teleprompter.
I found myself impatient during his fourth entry-sequence in the film; he would go on to have at least two more.
At 179 minutes, Prithviraj Sukumaran’s film is difficult to contain within one box. It’s a bloated star vehicle, whose progressive politics are surprisingly observant. It tries to bury India’s real-life horrors and anxieties into a film deliberately packaged to look as frivolous and opportunistic as possible.
But L2: Empuraan is every bit the cash-grabbing franchise, given that they end with an announcement of a third part of the film. Mohanlal’s recent apology for ‘hurting the sentiments’ of Hindus – and the producers agreeing to 17 cuts casts a cloud over the convictions of the producers.
However, in a time when people go out of their way to make films as apolitical as possible, one has got to admire the scraps of bravery shown by the filmmakers here by including a tragedy – which has almost been omitted in Indian films of the last 12 years.
The perplexity of the situation can be boiled down to the arc of actor Sukant Goel – who was a lead in Dibakar Banerjee’s Ghost Stories — who plays the ruthless right-hand man for Baba Bajrangi here. In Banerjee’s short, Goel is trying to survive an ethnic clash in an Indian village, and over here he’s the one inflicting it. Life has come full circle; the perpetrators are now the offended.
*L2: Empuraan is playing in theatres; an edited version of the film is expected to re-release soon.
