As Vikram Vedha teaser drops, will Hrithik Roshan be able to fill Vijay Sethupathi's shoes?

The first teaser for the Hindi remake of Vikram Vedha just dropped on the Internet and audiences got the first glimpse of the titular characters. Starring Saif Ali Khan as the tough cop Vikram and Hrithik Roshan as the ruthless gangster Vedha, the film is a remake of the Tamil original of the same name.

The trailer promises to replicate the gritty neo-noir magic of the original even if Roshan’s take on Vedha seems to be more glamourised than the nuanced portrayal by Vijay Sethupathi. 

How Vikram Vedha established Vijay Sethupathi:  The original Vikram Vedha came out in 2017 and opened to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The husband-wife duo of Pushkar-Gayathri wrote and directed the film and will be making their Hindi debut with the aforementioned remake. 

While all aspects of the original’s production were praised and R Madhavan was applauded for his controlled performance as Vikram, the spotlight was on Vijay Sethupathi who played the story-telling antagonist Vedha, a character with several grey areas dotting his backstory. 

Even though his first lead role came way back in 2010, the role of Vedha (and later that of the transwoman Shilpa in Super Deluxe) is what established him among a wider demographic, including non-Tamil-speaking audiences. Every now and then, the film’s Hindi dubs drop on YouTube (and then get taken down for piracy reasons) and amass thousands of views. Sethupathi’s casting in this year’s pan-Indian hit Vikram has only cemented his success further as he got to share screen space with Kamal Haasan. 

And last year, he teased the fact that he would make his Hindi debut in the Vikrant Massey-starrer Mumbaikar. With Hindi audiences being more appreciative of South stars these days, Sethupathi’s fanbase is bound to increase. 

What Sethupathi brought to the character: Coming back to his portrayal of Vedha, it definitely makes for one of the most menacing villains in recent Indian cinema. But most of the terror that he brought was with his dialogue delivery alone. With the exception of a few violent flashbacks, Vedha’s personality can be understood in the conversations that he has with Vikram and stories that he tells him (modelled after the folklore of Vikram-Betaal in which the haunted corpse tells stories to the king).  

This is where the film’s sense of good and evil also comes to play. While Vikram has a clearcut binary of what is good and what is evil, Vedha tries to look at the grey areas that lay in between and forms his belief system on this basis. Hence, no matter how ruthless he is, Vedha is not a manic sociopath who derives any sort of pleasure from his reign of violence. Instead, he indulges in violence for in his mind, it is the right thing to do. 

First impressions on Hrithik Roshan from the trailer: However, the characterisation of Vedha in the Hindi version seems to border towards a more action-hero archetype. We see glimpses of Roshan’s Vedha walking with a blood-stained samurai sword and then firing Rambo-style at multiple people with a rifle. Maybe, this suits a star like Roshan who has indulged in ‘one-man army’ action roles, before but here’s hoping that the action doesn’t take away the nuances of the character. Obviously compared to the original of Rs 11 crore, the remake (which has a budget of Rs 175 crore) would try to be bigger if not better. 

For Saif, it would be an easier job to play Madhavan’s character. And in fact, the role of a troubled cop who engages in a relationship of metaphorical tales with his adversary is even closer to his role of Sartaj Singh in Sacred Games. But for Roshan, a man who is perhaps known more for his good looks than his acting, filling in Vijay Sethupathi’s shoes might be a challenge. 

The crux of the original was the conversation scenes between the titular characters. While we see a cuffed Vedha talking to Vikram and explaining to him his moral compass, none of the dialogues in the Hindi teaser are memorable so far. Vedha also seems to have an accent and vocabulary that is reminiscent of Bhojpuri or some UP variants of Hindi. This choice seems strange and one can only hope that Roshan doesn’t overdo the accent. The ones who didn’t enjoy Roshan’s brownface-laden portrayal of a Bihari teacher in Super 30 would know what I mean. 

Of course, the Hindi remake will be filled with some changes and Roshan has every right to reinvent the character but it will be pretty difficult for admirers of the original to not get reminded of Sethupathi while watching him in action. With a release date of September 30, it is yet to be seen whether Roshan can pull off a good job playing the bad guy.