A few minutes into Sivakarthikeyan’s Madharaasi, you see a police battalion taking on a mysterious figure, who is single-handedly fighting a group of special unit cops trying to take down a gun supply operation. The staging is careful not to show the face of the acrobatic figure taking on the cops with a sort of stealthy charm. The crowd at my screening started going berserk. You know this is not our hero, and you recognize the darkly lit figure as he picks up a dead cop’s helmet from the ground. AR Murugadoss slowly cuts to a poker-faced Vidyut Jammwal staring right back at the camera with nonchalance, with Anirudh Ravichander’s beats revving loudly in the background. The inspector in-charge of the operation points at the screen and declares with a breathless indignation, ‘Virat, Virat has come.’This is the villain’s introduction scene. You get the drill. Let us look at how AR Murugadoss navigates the conception and handling of the bad guys in his busy mainstream action films.Also Read | Before Madharaasi, examining the social issue based commercial cinema of A R MurugadossIn the constantly changing grammar of commercial cinema, with the reframing of good vs evil narratives and how immorality is represented on screen, AR Murugadoss makes the entry of his villain a grand set piece with its own grammar and particular detailing that is emblematic of his cinema. Murugadoss’ villains are a genre unto themselves. The director, known for his testosterone-fueled action entertainers, specializes in something that most filmmakers in the mainstream struggle to do in star-centric films. He comes up with exciting bad guys for his leading man, as he is aware of the axiom of storytelling that ‘for the hero to shine bright, you need an equally well designed villain’, forcing his actions. Also Read | Shane Nigam on his ‘dark phase’, headspace during the shooting of Ishq and how the pandemic helped him to bounce backThe antagonist archetype in Murugadoss films counterbalances the virtues of the hero and upends the villains as ‘punching bags’ cliche, prompted by less imaginative dramaturgy that fails to create a convincing challenge for the hero on screen. Murugadoss comes up with inventive ways for the hero and villain. For instance, in Madharaasi, he expertly sets up the larger-than-life status of Virat, played by Vidyut Jammwal. Casting Vidyut Jammwal as the cold-blooded, menacing Virat in Madharaasi is a meta wink and a call-back to an earlier antagonist played by the same actor in Vijay’s blockbuster Thuppakki (2012). There he played an undercover lead of a terrorist sleeper cell unit whose sharp wit and observational skill give the hero a hard time. You need a guy like Vidyut Jammwal to pull off the action sequences in Madharaasi, but the audience’s familiarity to the no-nonsense loner from Thuppakki, bleeds into setting up the perfect foil for Sivakarthikeyan in Madharaasi. The films of AR Murugadoss use imaginative settings and character types to populate his antagonist figures. Social forces and political evils play spoilsport in the hero’s journey in Murugadoss’ film, so he devises well-written personifications of these evils in ‘bad guy’ types and creates situations that are smartly conceived to sidestep the conventional beats. In most commercial films today, villains have been reduced to bland, screaming psychopaths with no distinct identity, who are mere superficial placeholders for the hero to overcome. For instance, the kind of villains in a Lokesh Kanagaraj film, a Nelson film, or a Shankar film are far too identifiable and less defined than the bad guy in the films of Murugadoss.Story continues below this adAlso Read | The weird and out of the box romantic fables of Vignesh ShivanRemember the image of the twin evil brothers in Ghajini, or the menacing martial artist-cum-biological terrorist Dong Lee from Ezham Arivu, the uber cool industrialist Chirag played by Neil Nitin Mukesh in Kaththi (The flute based score by Anirudh is enough to remember the style with which he dominated Vijay in many scenes in that film), or S J Suryah as the sadistic psychopath in Mahesh Babu starrer Spyder? All these are generic action films that rises above conventionality with their treatment of the antagonist figures, who are given chances to one up the hero at regular intervals. AR Murugadoss is old school in the way he writes his antagonists. He is not afraid to let them overshadow the hero or take the spotlight. In an increasingly creatively bankrupt industry, that regurgitates age-old kitsch and moustache twirling for ‘villainy’, it is a welcome change to see a director write his villain with the same care as that of the leading man. Murugadoss villains don’t give up so easily and are never made to look silly or clueless on screen. These are dangerous people, who externalized the threat to the hero in human form. In Thuppaki, Vidyut Jammwal’s terrorist villain does not even have a name that registers during the runtime.It’s pretty common knowledge that this bare sketch of a character has been widely celebrated as one of the finest bad guys in contemporary Tamil cinema. The character barely speaks unless important and makes his moves with deep introspection. You feel the wheels moving inside his head though Vidyut’s blank cadence does not give away the emotional state of the villain. You know exactly what he is feeling at all times and he holds his own against the cunning army officer, who is always two steps ahead of him.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Rhythm turns 25: Meena and Arjun Sarja’s career-best performances anchor this tender romance classicWhen you look at recent Tamil cinema, there has been a dearth of solidly conceived villains, who are anything more than howling hooligans engaged in brawls and bloodshed. But, in Thuppaki and Kaththi, the villain is almost a cipher for the hero to overcome. The hero and villain rarely meet face to face and their interactions are mostly limited to phone calls. Murugadoss plots a reversal of Liam Neeson’s famous ‘ I don’t know who you are’ monologue from Taken into a different context in Thuppaki, where the villain who has recently discovered the hero on his trail, delivers a iterated version of the same ‘I will find you and kill you’ monologue. The roles are virtually reversed as Murugadoss understands how the drama is transferred to his mystery villain, who sees himself as the hero of the story at the point when he is introduced in the film.To which a untethered Vijay responds, ‘I am waiting,’ which is of course a part of pop culture lexicon now. Murugadoss comes up with stylish gestures for his villains like the way he sets up the second introduction for Virat in Madharaasi, where he is shown taking down an entire floor full of security officers with the most minimal effort possible after taking push up’s off his hospital bedside rooftop. You see Vidyut Jammwal getting as much appreciation from the crowd as the hero in that moment and sometimes even more. This is because Murugadoss is aware of how critical it is for a more than competent villain in building the myth of the hero even bigger.Also Read | Rajinikanth’s Coolie, Vijay’s Leo: The second half problem with the cinema of Lokesh KanagarajStory continues below this adEven though Murugadoss also comes up with the most audacious villains on screen, he gives them solid backstories except for maybe S J Suryah’s habitual psychological madman who just wants to see the world burn. AR Murugadoss villains are born out of a particular problem or societal condition without repentance. Murugadoss villains have changed and shape shifted across his filmography and one can only hope to see the filmmaker use genius ways to present obstacles for the hero like return to form film Madharaasi showed us all. Less Sikander and more Madharaasi please.