Like his counterparts up North, Rajinikanth doesn’t seem interested in breaking off his hard-earned image. Here director K.S. Ravikumar is more interested in catering to what fans expect from the superstar than telling a griping story. Unlike Robot , where Shankar reinvented the star within his space, Ravikumar makes Rajinikanth repeat himself ad nauseum without any real purpose. The erratic pacing and lack of emotional hook leaves you with little except for marvelling at Rajinikanth’s ability to carry a verbose, patchy screenplay on his shoulders.
So we have a double role for the “Thalaivar”. One a modern day petty thief and the other a British-period generous king cum engineer who builds a dam for the drought-stricken area. Of course there are people with vested interests who don’t want the dam built leading to a conflict but with no credible counterforce, the stakes never swell into something even remotely threatening.
Instead of whipping an emotional frenzy through compelling situations, the narrative nods at Rajinikanth’s political ambitions, his spirituality and how he can sacrifice his interests for others with ‘handkerchief scenes’ designed to juice out emotions. The image also demands strategic placement of heroines (Anushka Shetty and Sonakshi Sinha) around the star but with the actor deciding to maintain a fair distance from his much younger co-actors, the romantic angle never blossoms into something credible. In the Hindi dubbed version, the film loses some of the flavour because even Sonakshi Sinha doesn’t dub for herself.