Sam Anton: Comparing Vijay's Beast to my film Gurkha is unacceptable; Nelson's attempt is laudable

Ever since the trailer of Vijay's Beast was released, many movie buffs couldn't stop comparing its story with Sam Anton's Gurkha (streaming on Amazon Prime Video) which released in 2019. They pointed out the similarity between the Nelson directorial and the Yogi Babu-starrer as both of them revolve around terrorists hijacking a mall.

However, in a recent interaction with Vikatan, Sam Anton said that the comparison is unfair in many ways. When he was asked if had watched Beast, the director said that he had watched it three times already and that he immensely liked the film.

He said, "Just because both the movies have a similar plot doesn't mean you can make unfair comparisons. Hollywood has Christmas films, almost all of them revolve around the celebration. Nobody says they are similar movies. They belong to the same genre, that's it."

Similarly, Gurkha is a small film which has an emotionally weak protagonist saving a few people from a mall because of his sheer luck. That's quite different from Beast, which has a huge star like Vijay who appears as a spy rescuing a lot of people from a mall."

Sam went on to heap praise on Vijay for coming out of his comfort zone and attempting something which he hasn't tried before. "I loved his movies like Vaseegara and Puli because they were not the kinds of projects he had been part of when they were released. Now, Beast is different from the movies which he has been attempting for a while," he added.

Pointing out a small similarity between Vijayakanth's Captain Prabhakaran and Allu Arjun's Pushpa, he asked if it is fair to compare the two films. According to him, a film like Beast offers several opportunities for assistant directors who want to make different attempts with stars like Vijay or Ajith.