Teresa Reviews Grandmaster (2012)
Teresa reviews Grandmaster (2012) and found it fast-moving but incoherent Indian version of “The ABC Murders”
(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel
Fidelity to text: 3 stranglers
The taunting letters, the loony patsy, and the faked serial killer remain in this Malayalam police procedural.
Quality of movie: 3 stranglers
Fast-paced and often incoherent with an entire, unclear police corruption subplot plus added music videos.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
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But this film isn’t a Bollywood production. It’s from Kerala, a region along the southwestern tip of India, where they speak Malayalam.
I’m sure an Indian audience would instantly pick up on plot twists, local flavor, cultural mores, and in-jokes that I missed. The subtitles were decent but still didn’t translate everything into English. Our star, Mohanlal, has acted (to date) in more than 400 Malayalam films, none of which I’d ever heard of and you probably haven’t either.
Based on Grandmaster, we should probably rectify this omission.
Or perhaps not. There were issues.
Mohanlal, playing Chandrashekhar, (Hercule Poirot, believe it or not) isn’t your typical action star which added some oddities to this often drastically rewritten A.B.C. Murders. He’s in his 50s and not what you’d call physically fit, yet still takes on multiple bad guys in badly choreographed fights that scream he wasn’t fit enough to film them himself but insisted on doing his own stunts anyway.
Not here. Chandrashekhar also plays grandmaster level chess, which is far more plausible than him turning into a young Akshay Kumar. Top-level chess demands serious mental muscle, not biceps of steel. He can think, really think, making him a reasonable Poirot substitute despite Poirot never being this kind of action hero.
Like Poirot, Chandrashekhar sometimes suffer from a malaise of the spirit. In his case, it’s due to his divorce nine years ago. His up-and-coming lawyer wife (looking way too young for her role) used confidential information he told her (when discussing the case) to get her guilty client off. He slapped her when he found out, she promptly left with their toddler daughter, he retired from the force, and none of them ever got over it.
Because he was the best policemen in Kerala, Chandrashekhar gets called out of an unhappy retirement to take over a new crime division handling high-profile cases. He wastes each day, playing chess and grousing about his lack of household help, until a young woman gets kidnapped by a psycho. Her two friends had also been kidnapped. He finally springs into action, working out in true Poirot fashion who is the most likely suspect. Since he’s still the best, despite being over 50, Chandrashekhar infiltrates the villain’s lair alone, fights the much younger, much fitter kidnapper (named Jerome), defeats him, and rescues the damsels.
This is where the weird subplot came in, the one that was never understandable, never came to a real conclusion, and seemed to be setting up a sequel about corruption in high places. Jerome, our crazy kidnapper, seems to be related to Susan, an important woman in the Kerala police department. He’s her — I think! — illegitimate half-brother. Her father, also important in the Kerala police department — I think! — can’t acknowledge Jerome publicly but still wants to protect him from prosecution for kidnapping, torture, and whatever else he was doing with those damsels in his lair. He persuades Jerome’s shrink and Chandrashekhar’s ex-wife to get Jerome into the asylum instead of a courtroom. Those girls had asked for it, you see.
Anyway. Chandrashekhar plucks a letter from a stack of them and proving his mental acumen, it’s a taunting letter from a loon promising murder. Alice’s body is soon discovered. Susan provides background information to Chandrashekhar about Alice. She wasn’t a mere beachside coffeeshop owner. She was a drug dealer and known to the local police. After Alice, another letter arrives. Beena, an up-and-coming popstar, is found dead. Then letter #3 and it’s Chandrika’s turn to be strangled with a red scarf and have a cross carved into her forehead.
Chandrashekhar deciphers clues, such as dates, and realizes the serial killer is tying the murders to events in his own life. In between investigating Alice, Beena, and Chandrika, he spends time with his teenage daughter. She’s on her way to drama camp where they meet up-and-coming actor, Mark Roshan. Pay attention to him because despite getting about 20 minutes of screen time, 17 of them at the climax when it matters, he’s critical to the plot. If you don’t, you’ll wonder who that guy is when he suddenly reappears because he’s never onscreen like a supposedly important character would be.
Meanwhile, Chandrashekhar reconnects with his ex-wife, Deepthi. Notice the “D?” Can you guess she’s next? That’s what Chandrashekhar thinks, leading him to give his ex-wife and daughter tracking bugs as jewelry, which vanishes from the plot. He also learns from Deepthi that about three years before, she finally learned that her client, Chandrika, was guilty as sin of murdering her lover, Paul Matthew, just as Chandrashekhar believed. Moreover, Alice, Beena, and Chandrika worked together as a ring of sex traffickers and blackmailers.
Meanwhile, serious policework goes on behind the scenes but you won’t learn this until the climax when all the facts are spelled out for us instead of learning them along the way. It all feels very deus ex machina, the way Chandrashekhar has worked it all out. But then, like Poirot, he’s a genius and we’re not.
It turns out that Victor Rosetti (A. B. Custe), crazy failed salesman, was set up to take the fall. Plus, since Alice, Beena, and Chandrika were closely linked via their own criminal activities, were they randomly chosen victims because of their names? They were not.
This was another change from The A.B.C. Murders. That plot, arranged by a fake serial killer, hinged on inheritance and greed. The body that counted was Sir Carmichael Clarke’s. The others were collateral damage. This plot, arranged by a fake serial killer, is one of revenge since all three women were as guilty as sin and needed to die. The fourth woman, as Chandrashekhar fears, is his ex, since she ensured that Chandrika didn’t face justice for her murder of Paul Matthews.
The real murderer finally appears. He’s onstage, a demon amidst a group of classical Indian dancers, and it’s the actor who you met for about 3 minutes two hours ago and then never saw again. But somehow, Chandrashekhar’s little gray cells and extensive, offscreen policework let him outguess the murderer.
In a final piece of silliness, Chandrashekhar doesn’t merely outwit the actor. He outfights him, shooting him dead before he can stab Deepthi.
I can’t see Poirot approving of so much exertion, although he would approve of Chandrashekhar’s cleverness.
