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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........

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