The producer of Marco – the Malayalam crime drama from 2024 whose main ambition was to be one of the most violent films ever made – is back with Kattalan. First-time director Paul George’s movie, which is also available in Hindi, is unsurprisingly big on massacres – of humans and elephants.Called in by desperate forest dwellers to get rid of a rogue elephant, a hunter smells an opportunity. Maari (Suneel) launches an ivory smuggling empire that flourishes despite a ban. With forest department officials, cops and politicians on his payroll, Maari slaughters pachyderms and hacks off their tusks like it’s going out of style.Maari frequently clashes with his rival Eddie (Kabir Duhan Singh). The skilled transporter Antony (Antony Varghese) becomes Maari’s most valuable employee, managing to sneak out the tusks under the eye of the police each time. It’s revealed towards the end of a punishing 120 minutes that Antony has a connection with characters in Marco. The Marco Cinematic Universe is being built, one corpse at a time.Kattalan is little more than a series of slaughters carried out by men who saunter through clouds of smoke created by fog machines and cigarette smoke. Just to ensure some gender parity, Dushara Vijayan turns up as the gun-toting Lucy.There’s a robotic aspect to the bloodletting, with only Jagadish’s character Ali resembling a human being. The action scenes go on forever. If you get distracted by a phone alert or the diminishing supply of popcorn and return to the screen, you will find the characters still at it, grimacing, yelling and hacking away while Ravi Basrur’s background score assault the ears.The resemblance to the Pushpa films is glaring, from actors who appear in those movies to the money that is being made by desecrating nature. In all of this, nobody weeps for the elephants, the unfortunate suppliers of “white gold”.