A sobered-down fighter, carrying in his gait and time-worn face the glimmers of a bloody past, happens to be a commonly used trope in mass actioners. In RDX, we have not just one, but three trained martial arts fighters, Robert (Shane Nigam), his brother Dony (Antony ‘Pepe’ Varghese) and their friend Xavier (Neeraj Madhav), who have left their past behind settled down into their relatively more peaceful lives. Yet, the embers of past combats have not fully died out, and could reappear anytime, disrupting their serenity.
In Nahas Hidayath’s debut directorial, a daring home invasion and brutal violence appears as the triggering point, upsetting the peace that exists in the lives of the protagonists. It is the event around which the numerous fight sequences that fill the film are written, for it has a connection to their past and a bearing on their future. In some of the recent Malayalam films filled with one fight sequence after another, one gets a feeling that they were looking for a reason to fight; in RDX, the preceding events justifies the action that follows in most cases.
