Coolie: Rajinikanth’s Swagger Meets Worker Solidarity

Coolie: Rajinikanth’s Swagger Meets Worker Solidarity

Rajinikanth has always been larger than life, but in Coolie he seems to know exactly what that life was worth when it was spent hauling luggage for other people. This is a film about labor, not in the vague “working man” sense, but about the indignities and solidarities of workers who carry the world on their backs until their spines break — and then get discarded.

It’s an odd thing to see in mainstream Indian cinema, where workers usually appear as background color, a chorus of nameless faces. Here they’re the story. Deva, Rajinikanth’s ex-union leader, stalks through the plot less like an avenging angel and more like a weary man who knows how long the deck has been stacked against him. His investigation into his friend’s death unearths the same villains we’ve always had: men who get rich by grinding others into dust.

The film is messy — gloriously so. The action is overblown, the melodrama sometimes topples into kitsch, and the villains practically twirl their mustaches. But you don’t go to Rajinikanth to admire restraint. You go because he can still turn a line into a battle cry, and because when he swaggers into the frame, you remember that he once was the man hauling someone else’s baggage.

That personal connection, the badge number borrowed from the director’s father, matters more than any narrative polish. It roots the whole spectacle in something real: worker dignity. This isn’t art-house austerity; it’s populist myth-making with a conscience.

And maybe that’s what’s so bracing. Coolie doesn’t pretend to solve exploitation, but it refuses to let audiences forget it. For once, union solidarity isn’t a footnote — it’s the climax. Cinema this loud rarely dares to say anything. Here it says: the coolie is not your backdrop, he’s the hero, and he’s coming for what was stolen.