There is no hiding from the fact that directors in India are giving absolutely everything to entertain the audience by coming up with superb stories glorying the police over the years.
Director Hari, who hogged the limelight in the year 2003 with his cop story ‘Saamy’ starring Vikram in the lead role, has now expressed his disappointment over having made as many as five films that glorified the police.
In his letter dated and signed June 28, the director, whose popular cop glorifying films include Suriya’s Singam franchise, wrote that no person from Tamil Nadu should suffer brutality that happened in Sathankulam.
“The Sathankulam incident should not happen to anyone else in Tamil Nadu. The only way for that is to punish all those involved with the highest sentence. The violation by some in the police force has brought dishonour upon the entire force. I am deeply saddened today for having made five films glorifying the police,” he wrote.
Hari’s heartbreaking statement comes after huge outrage in Tamil Nadu over the custodial deaths of father and son Jayaraj and Bennix. The father-son duo were allegedly subjected to police brutality and torture and after which, they both died in custody.
The postmortem report is yet to be made public but the eyewitness accounts in the media led to much public rage and anger.
Hari has by far made five films on the police force in which, all of the movies justify encounters and praise police violence. In his letter, the director cites two Saamy films – Saamy and Saamy Square – made 15 years apart and three Singam films – Singam, Singam II and Singam III – starring Suriya in the lead.
These aforementioned movies have superb action sequences with the lead characters mouthing punch dialogues as they keep crime under control.
Hari’s Singam franchise was remade in other languages as well. The first Singam film released in the year 2010 in Tamil and was remade in several Indian languages including Kannada, Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi. In Hindi Singham movie, actor Ajay Devgn played the lead role.
Many celebrities have been tweeting about the deaths, including the likes of Priyanka Chopra, Rajkummar Rao, Rakul Preet Singh, Disha Patani. Even actor Suriya released a statement condemning the custodial violence while also calling for an end to violence of power.