Endhiran played a bit with superhero tropes, but at heart it was a movie about a scientist tampering in God's domain, a big budget Frankenstein for a new audience. So it's no surprise that in the sequel, 2.0 (2018), our artificial man meets Dracula. And by Dracula, I mean the vengeful ghost of a mild-mannered ornithologist, returned from beyond with the uncanny power to control cell phones.
Doctor Vaseegaran (Rajnikanth) is still making robots, despite the disastrous robot rampage that ended the last movie, but this time he's being a bit more responsible; at the very least, Nila (Amy Jackson) is programmed with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Nila is designed to be a "Nice, Intelligent Lovely Assistant," only mildly superhuman compared to her predecessor, Chitti (Rajnikanth), but much better at interacting with humans. (Meanwhile, Vasee's long-suffering girlfriend Sana (Savitha Reddy) is miles away and only ever appears as a nagging voice on the phone, presumably so we don't notice that she isn't played by Aishwarya Rai anymore.)
And then every cell phone in Chennai suddenly activates and flies up into the sky, forming a huge flock of phones before vanishing into the upper atmosphere. The government assembles a scientific council to try and figure out what is happening, and Vaseegaran immediately suggests reactivating Chitti, but other scientists disagree, especially Doctor Bohra (Sudhanshu Pandey), who happens to be the son of the bad guy from the last movie and is still a little mad about his father's grisly death.
And speaking of grisly deaths, the phone flock starts killing people. Very specific people, all involved in the cell phone industry. By the time the flock has reshaped itself into a kaiju-sized eagle and starts ripping up cell towers, the scientific council decides that maybe reactivating Chitti isn't such a bad idea after all. Chitti saves most of the city, then Doctor Vaseegaran and his robnot pals track the phones down and discover that the swarm is powered by the spirit of ornithologist Pakshi Rajan (Akshay Kumar), who has vowed to punish humanity for the mass death of birds.
Using the power of positive ions (and Ghostbusters ripoffs) Pakshi's spirit is captured, and everything is great. There's a ceremony! Tearful speeches are given! Everybody just decides to forget about all the people Chitti killed in the last movie! But Doctor Bohra is not happy, and releases Pakshi. The ghost possesses Vaseegan's body, using it to go on an anti-cell phone rampage in the heart of the city. Chitti charges to the rescue, but because he can not bring himself to harm his creator, he is quickly dismantled. Then Pakshi turns into a weird human-bird-cell phone hybrid and flies off. As one does.
Two of the three protagonists have been taken out, but Nila is still on the job. She repairs Chitti, then inserts the red chip from the last movie that activates his evil "2.0" persona; after all, while Chitti can't bring himself to harm his creator, 2.0 is delighted to do so. And, as in the previous movie, 2.0 creates an army of duplicates to help him, meaning a return of the Giant Hamster Ball of Doom, though sadly no giant snake. The movie itself frames this as a clash between Good and Evil, but it's really a battle between "Amoral Jerk With a Relaxed Attitude Toward Collateral Damage" and "Well-Meaning But Genocidal Zealot Who Has Things to Say About Ecological Balance."
Let me get the bad stuff out of the way first. Sana wasn't exactly a deep and well-rounded character, but here she's reduced to an offscreen caricature of a jealous, nagging girlfriend. It would have been better to leave her out of the movie entirely. And then there is the science, which is bad for a movie about a robot fighting a ghost. The movie has a valid point to make about the delicate balance of life and how much we depend upon the creatures that share our world with us, but then it tries to make that point with a load of pseudoscientific gibberish that even the evil cell phone executives can't help but point out is not scientifically proven. And of course negative ions are not evil, they just have extra electrons and want to share.
However, nuanced characterization and scientific accuracy are not the main draw here. This is a movie built to deliver spectacle, and it does exactly that. The early scenes of cell phone murder are effectively creepy, making light seem more sinister than darkness. And yes, there are robots. And the robots fight things, in a variety of spectacular ways. It is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be.
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