The Midnight Madness strand at TIFF is always a highlight. This year, the likes of The Predator and Halloween get their world premieres in the strand, but here’s a trailer for another movie playing late at night in Toronto, the genre-twisting The Man Who Feels No Pain. You can watch The Man Who Feels No Pain trailer below.
The Man Who Feels No Pain trailer
The Man Who Feels No Pain is an action-packed flick that combines an outrageous premise, show-stopping Bollywood set pieces, inventive martial arts brawls, and a freewheeling, pop-culture sensibility. It is described as a delirious action-comedy about a young man born with the ability to feel no pain who begins a quest to vanquish 100 adversaries.
It is a glorious B-movie homage to kung fu and exploitation films of the VHS era: martial arts films, Bollywood extravaganzas, Shaw Brothers shoestring epics, Django and Western movies, American trash classics. It stars Abhimanyu Dassani (son of popular Bollywood star Bhagyashree) in his acting debut and is the first Indian movie to play TIFF’s Midnight Madness Section.
Related: TIFF opening and closing films announced
Here’s the official synopsis:
In this Bollywood-infused action film from Vasan Bala (Peddlers, TIFF 2012), a young man literally born with the ability to feel no pain strikes out on a quest to vanquish 100 foes.
An outrageous and eccentric crowd-pleaser inspired by a heartfelt love of all things genre (B-movies, exploitation, kung fu flicks, screwball comedies, and much more), writer-director Vasan Bala puts every low budget 80’s and 90’s film genre into the cinematic blender to concoct this mayhem-filled mashup.
Seasoned with delirious pop-culture references and freewheeling fisticuffs, Bala’s film endearingly synthesizes the infectious vivacity of Bollywood masala extravaganzas with the irreverent martial arts mayhem of vintage Stephen Chow, underpinning this amusingly serpentine story with a through line about personal empowerment.
Abhimanyu Dassani, son of popular Bollywood star Bhagyashree, makes a charismatic debut as the title character. He fights alongside rising star Radhika Madan, a fearless warrior determined to rehabilitate the honour of her one-legged karate master, Manni, who is – as one tends to be in any good martial-arts epic – caught in a gang war with his psychotic twin brother, Jimmy (Gulshan Devaiah in a remarkable dual performance, one half of which seems to be channelling Nicolas Cage circa 1997). Dassani and Madan have delightful chemistry, both in the film’s numerous inventive brawls and the requisite musical set pieces. Madan, in particular, shines in a progressive subplot that brims with subversive relevance.
Watch The Man Who Feels No Pain trailer in the player below. Keep it THN over the next tens days for all of our coverage from the Toronto International Film Festival.
