Expectations can be tricky for movies. The marketing and fan hype surrounding a film can set an unrealistically high bar, even for some of the best movies. 

Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Coolie was one of my most anticipated movies of 2025. The aggressive marketing campaign offered sparing story details, but lots and lots of chatter about the star-studded cast. 

This was a truly pan-India film, headlined by Superstar Rajinikanth, with Nagarjuna Akkineni taking on the role of the big bad, and huge talent from industries all over the country including Soubin Shahir, Sathyaraj, Shruti Haasan, Upendra, and Aamir Khan. 

When the film finally opened, fans were pumped up, whistling at the title card for Rajinikanth, dancing along to the music of Anirudh Ravichander, and eagerly awaiting the moment when all the storylines would come together in a grand climax.

But that moment never really comes in Coolie. 

The first half of the film plants lots of seeds. Rajinikanth’s Deva attends the funeral services for his friend Rajasekar (Sathyaraj), but he’s met with anger and thrown out by Rajasekar’s daughter Preethi (Haasan). Clearly, something went down between the old friends over the years, and we, as an audience, can’t wait to find out what.

Soon, we learn that Rajasekar created a sort of electric chair device that can cremate a body in seconds with the aim of getting local governments to use it to dispose of deceased stray animals, but this tech is quickly scooped up by smuggling syndicate kingpin Simon (Akkineni) and his right-hand man Dayal (Shahir), who want to use it to help them disappear all the dead bodies generated by their work. 

The story could have been about Deva saving Preethi from the clutches of the bad guys when she’s forced to carry on her father’s work after his death. It could have also been about Simon’s paranoia that there’s a police department mole in his gang, something given great importance at first and then kind of ignored in the second half. It could have even been about Deva’s past and what connection he had to Simon’s enterprise.

Instead, it’s about all these things and a few hundred more, with enough double-crosses, tripple-crosses, reveals, flashbacks, unmotivated character shifts, plot detours, and cameos to make the entire experience feel like a bloated, convoluted slog. 

The performances are the saving grace of Coolie. 

Rajinikanth is a true superstar, and his charisma carries so much of this movie in its clunkier moments. The way he flashes a smile, delivers a line, or brings intensity to his stare makes us instantly like Deva and want him to uncover the various mysteries as the plot unfolds.

Haasan is able to show some range and nails her emotional scenes, though she’s quickly sidelined into a more typical damsel in distress. Likewise, Akkineni uses his natural charm to make Simon dashing and deadly, but he’s criminally underutilized in the nearly three-hour runtime. 

Shahir is given the most to do and delivers a great unhinged henchman, despite his character making some baffling decisions that made me wonder if some scenes were accidentally mixed up in the edit. 

And baffling decisions seem to be the name of the game in Coolie. I was jotting down notes for this review as I was watching the film and the word “why” appeared over a dozen times. I kept waiting for some of the many, many loose ends to tie up, but the movie seemed more interested in shoehorning in cameos than in having any kind of coherent script. 

The problem with this approach is that it focuses on individual moments that look cool, but gives us little to no emotional investment in why those moments are happening. As we’ve learned from S. S. Rajamouli, action shouldn’t exist without emotion. Stakes are what can make a slow-motion punch feel as impactful as a tearful monologue. By the time we get to cameos from Upendra and Khan, we’re already too disconnected to care.

There’s probably a great movie in here somewhere—hell, there are probably about three great movies in here if any of these big ideas were actually explored—but instead of the pan-Indian blockbuster we were all hoping for, Coolie just gave us a messy movie with lots of wasted potential.