The film does seem like it provides some food for thought on the subject whether the director intended it or not though, as one can't help thinking that things might have gone better all round if the cops had actually arrested some of the people they "economically" dispatched.
I ended up sampling some bits of the director's commentary to see what he had to say on the matter, but it seems that he has no particular disagreement with the idea that killing criminals is a generally good approach to fighting crime. I was hoping that the film would explore the ethics of this viewpoint, and it seemed in many places that it was about to do so but then it never quite did. Another factor that may turn off some viewers is that the film does seem to condone police violence (well, murder to be blunt) as a means of fighting crime. If you like your films to be feel-good and life-affirming, you probably don't need to read any more of this review 'cause you should know by now that this isn't a film for you. This will undoubtedly upset some viewers, but it's all good with me. There definitely seems to be a move towards darker, grittier and more violent films in India in recent years, and Kaakha Kaakha continues this trend, taking the film to some pretty nasty places. The ultimate collision of these two threads makes both all the more powerful. One of the nice things about the typically long running times of Indian films is that they can develop characters and plots in a lot more detail than the average 100 minute action film could dream of, and in 2.5 hours we get a good development of both these strands in Anbuselvan's life. Obviously in 2 hours they go into quite a bit more detail than that, but I will leave that for the interested viewer to discover for his or her self ) Kaakha Kaakha serves up both a solid love story and a solid crime story, with the former dominating at first but giving way to the latter as time goes by.
Why go to all the cost of a court trial when a bullet can bring justice a lot quicker? The girl in his musical daydream is Maya, the woman who managed to get inside his stony heart. He rose up the ranks of the Madras police force and together with a group of his colleagues became somewhat notorious for his tough methods in bringing down criminals.
The man is DCP Anbuselvan and he is a cop.
It's fully 2 hours before we return to this point in time, by which time we understand a lot more and have a lot more motivation to want him to pull himself together. The film then goes into flashback mode to fill in the story of who this man is and how he came to this situation.
Upon the song's conclusion he regains consciousness and struggles out of the lake, and informs the viewer that despite being full of bullets he has to pull himself together and go rescue that girl. Kaakha Kaakha starts with a man crashing out of a lakeside house into the water, covered in blood, where he sinks to the bottom and has a musical dream about a beautiful girl. The influence of Ram Gopal Varma feels strong in them both, and the influence of Hollywood too it must be admitted. Both are cops and criminals cat-and-mouse affairs filmed in a modern, "edgy" style with plenty of testosterone and quite a dark tone. I am pretty sure Khakee was influenced by Kaakha Kaakha, even though the stories are essentially quite different. Kaakha Kaakha scotches the notion that Tamil films are all artsy and low budget though, being a full-blown blockbuster with plentiful action and song and dance scenes that would fit quite neatly into any Bollywood affair.
As it turns out, they are actually two quite different films, though there are more similarities than the name (derived from the Khaki uniforms of the Indian police, I believe). I picked up another Tamil film, Kaakha Khaaka, thinking that it was the original film from which the 2004 Hindi blockbuster Khakee originated. Some recent films have even been made in Tamil and Hindi in parallel, with one film reportedly having the same scenes shot twice with two different casts :p Anyway, my exposure to Indian film has mostly been through Hindi cinema, and the two Tamil films I had previously seen (Santoshi Sivan's "The Terrorist" and Mani Ratnam's "A Peck On The Cheek" seemed to confirm the notion that the films were more low-key artistic creations. One fairly odd phenomenon is that Tamil movies that are successful are often remade in Hindi, often by the same director these days but usually with a different cast. However, there are 3 distinct movie industries in the country, with the Hindi industry being the biggest and most commercially successful, and the Tamil and Telegu film industries generally perceived to offer lower budget and "artier" fair. To most people, Indian cinema is equated with "Bollywood", the film industry based in Mumbai that produced predominantly Hindi language cinema.