Plot Summary – When a clever, carefree gangster is recruited to help an overseas crime lord take down a rival, he is caught off guard by the moral dilemmas that follow.

Language – Tamil

Where to Watch – Netflix (with English subtitles, available dubbed in major Indian languages)

★★ 

Watched on 18 Jun 2021

This is what it would look like if Shakespeare did a lot of weed while writing a play, but I still feel that that would be more nuanced than this. This is such an ambitious movie and sometimes that works brilliantly, especially with Dhanush but sadly Jagame Thandhiram is more of an example of a failure to live up to your own hype. The film thinks that it is way cooler, funnier and well-made than it actually is. It thinks name-dropping issues and having caricatures of these issues embodied as cartoonish people is ‘strong political messaging’. It thinks random, aimless action is fun to watch. For me, the main flaw is that it’s not even good from a mass perspective. It wants to be art cinema, it wants to be a mass film and it is neither. It is a random mix of genres, messages and thoughts floating around the writers’ heads. To be honest, the first 1.5 hours of this were solid and this would have been a decent film if it ended there but it doesn’t and becomes this over-bloated mess of a film. Dhanush gives a genuinely great performance but he isn’t given much to work with. He somehow makes really bad dialogue seem cool and you have to give him credit for that. Santhosh Narayanan absolutely nails the soundtrack as usual and I found that the music was a good break between the mind-numbingly stupid other parts of the film. I would not recommend this film to anyone.