Director Vaali Mohan Das' Madraskaaranin its teaser and trailer, showed flashes of a 2000s mass action entertainer, where a hero returns to his native, 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 or Sathya (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, having found greener pastures. As fate would have it, he crosses paths with don Durai Singam (Kalaiyarasan). Their encounter goes on to have a negative effect on the dream life Sathya has planned for.
The story is plagued with twin obstructions of logic and a confused series of events. Logic here is the precept by which events are linked within the limits of the film. For example, since the screenplay is worked around two men going at each other owing to their bruised egos, Sathya and Singam’s characters needed to be hellraisers with a quirk to them rather than the ordinary people they are. Shockingly, such writing is absent here. Emotional connection too doesn’t make the best argument for the film. There are just passing references to how much Sathya’s family was insulted in his native 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 scream intolerable levels of artificiality. 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 before one of them dies. Making the family go on wedding shopping a day before the wedding is already a convenient 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 really don’t care what happens to him as he was the one who asked for it.
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