Director Vaali Mohan Das’ Madraskaaran, in its trailer, was reminiscent of a 2000s best action entertainer, where a hero returns to his native place, messes with the local don and prevails in a cat-and-mouse game. The film, starring Shane Nigam and Kalaiyarasan, had the ability to join the league of such action entertainers. However, the makers do not bring anything fresh to the narrative.
Madraskaaran begins with the wedding arrangements of Sathyamoorthy (Shane Nigam) and Meera (Niharika Konidela) in Pudukottai. Sathya wants his big day to be held at his native, where his family fell into misfortune and fled to Chennai. As fate would have it, he crosses paths with local don Durai Singam (Kalaiyarasan).
Their encounter goes on to affect Sathya’s dream life. The story is plagued with logical mistakes and a confused series of events. Since the screenplay is worked around two men going at each other owing to their bruised egos, Sathya and Singam needed to be hellraisers with a quirk rather than ordinary people. Such detailing is absent.
The emotional connections don’t work either. There are just passing references to how much Sathya’s family was insulted during his childhood. The all-tell-no-show writing undercuts our attention by leaving spaces of vital information about the family blank, including the names of Sathya’s parents!
The situations that pit Sathya and Singam against each other are artificial. The idea is to bring the protagonist and antagonist outside, make them meet, of course not in a pleasant atmosphere, and turn them into enemies. Making the family go on wedding shopping a day before the wedding is already a conveninent idea.
Writing an inciting incident where the villain maintains restraint and the hero displays boisterousness, Vaali Mohan Das prevents us from rooting for Sathya and on the contrary, we don’t care what happens to him. Beyond the phone calls between Sathya and Meera, we don’t get enough information about their relationship. While they look good together on screen, especially when they break into ‘Thai Thakka Kalyanam’ and ‘Kadhal Sadugudu,’ there are no emotional stakes here either.
We don’t get what is going inside Meera’s head when she realises her beau’s life has changed upside down just hours before their big day. Though it is anybody’s guess what is going to happen next after she says, “Naa unakkaga life full-a wait pannuven,” the already unexplained importance of Sathya to Meera further weakens with her disappearing from the scene without a trace.
Given that she has fought and is still fighting her father, who is not yet convinced Sathya is an able suitor even a day before the wedding, it is necessary we know why she can’t live without him and vice versa. These spaces too are a huge disappointment.
The two-hour film felt longer than necessary, with several subplots branching out of the Sathya-Singam conflict. Adding to the runtime, red herrings should be used only when the real reveal has something substantial to offer.
Madraskaaran employs twists just for the sake of it, with those changes leading us nowhere. Again, it is a good idea to introduce more villains in what seems like a straightforward one-on-one clash. The film moves from Singam and Sathya to Singam’s wife Kalyani (Aishwarya Dutta) and his brother-in-law Manimaran (Charan) and then to Muthu Pandi (Super Subbarayan).
Certain segments that employ the Rashomon effect feel comparatively better. But strangely, in Madraskaaran, some ideas don’t take off and others are given wings only to be clipped midway to bring in another idea, and this cycle continues till the end.
It is disheartening to not find a single impressive character or an overriding emotional core in a film like Madraskaaran, where the bare minimum expectation is to appeal to our senses if not intelligence. Lines are placed in the film to establish the title, such as “Madraskaaran nenachavala kattikka poraan” and “Andha Madraskaaran-ah thookanum.” These dialogues are signs that the film failed all the hype it generated. The film had the potential to be many things, like a good love story, an engaging action story and a moving family drama, or at least any of it if not all. Unfortunately, it ends up not being anything.