Beast trailer: Vijay turns into a mean killing machine in this Die Hard-inspired mall invasion thriller

The trailer for Vijay’s Tamil film Beast (2022) was unveiled over the weekend and received very well. Going by the trailer, Beast looks like a mall invasion thriller inspired from Bruce Willis’s classic action thriller Die Hard (1988) with Vijay playing a ruthless spy who rises to the occasion to save everyone who is taken hostage in the building.

The trailer promises that the film will feature some gorgeously shot action sequences and Vijay in his most violent avatar yet.

Vijay plays a character called Veeraraghavan, one of the "most notorious spies" the country has ever had, according to the voice-over by filmmaker Selvaraghavan, who plays the mediator between the government and the terrorists.

Unlike Willis's John McClane in Die Hard, however, Vijay's Veeraraghavan does not seem to be much of a wisecracker. That job seems to be the lot of Selvaraghavan's mediator here.

Beast marks the maiden collaboration of director Nelson Dilipkumar with Vijay. Nelson rose to fame with his Tamil crime comedy thriller Kolamaavu Kokila (2018), starring Nayanthara as a middle-class working woman forced into the drug trade. His latest release was the Tamil dark comedy Doctor (2021), in which Sivakarthikeyan takes on a human-trafficking gang.

Beast features Pooja Hegde opposite Vijay for the first time. The film, which has music by Anirudh Ravichander, has been produced by Sun Pictures and is being distrbuted in the northern regions by UFO Moviez. The film is being released in Tamil, Telugu and a Hindi-dubbed version.

Vijay was previously seen on the big screen in the Tamil action drama Master (2021), in which he played a college professor with a drinking problem.Master was released in time for the Pongal festival last year, becoming the first mainstream Tamil film to be released after the pandemic struck India in March 2020, and went on to collect over Rs200 crore.