'Madharaasi' Movie Review: Glimpses of Peak-Era AR Murugadoss in Sivakarthikeyan's Fun Action-Thriller

After a series of underwhelming misfires, Madharaasi brings back glimpses of a forgotten AR Murugadoss that had made him our top commercial movie director. This isn’t just because he still has it in him to stage elaborately choreographed, neatly cut action blocks. This isn’t because he knows how to pander to a star’s fan base and still make a film relatively entertaining to the star-agnostic. The reason Murugadoss remains a brand is because he continues to have the ability to sell you a far-fetched high concept that sounds outlandish, but without allowing you to think of just how impossible all of it is.

In Madharaasi, this includes a setup that tells you that six containers filled with the latest guns are just one toll gate away from entering Tamil Nadu. Fifteen minutes later, he sells you another concept, this time about Raghu (Sivakarthikeyan), a man who suffers from delusions after he witnessed his entire family getting charred to death as a child. But instead of using this just as his backstory, the PTSD has given Raghu superpowers, the sort that let him take on a tiny army when triggered.

We also get the absolute most ideal heroine for such a film. Malathi (Rukmini Vasanth) isn’t just the signature ARM heroine with a heart of gold and the goodness to power a thousand NGOs, but she’s also got trauma of her own, which makes her attracted specifically to people who need to keep helping people. All of this may sound complex and silly, but you need to give in to these concepts to enjoy Madharaasi. Take, for instance, how the movie uses Raghu’s suicidal tendencies. At once he becomes the central force of an important police mission, only because he doesn’t care to live. But as the movie progresses, you witness the many role reversals at play to make sure Raghu remains alive through a dozen deaths all around.

Not only is it fun on a concept level, but I can’t think of a cleverer device to repackage Sivakarthikeyan as an action hero. Of course, he may have done movies like Amaran before this, but with Madharaasi, he’s attempting to enter the league reserved for top heroes, so it helps that he has a ‘condition’ to justify his ability to punish a few hundred.

It also works that he isn’t fearless by design, just because he’s the hero. He is fearless because he has nothing to lose and no one to worry about. These aspects of Raghu’s character are used with hints of humour, making him an interesting mix of raw superpower and a silly Everyman.

The film calls it Delusion Syndrome, but it’s just Murugadoss-speak for mass action. But you do not blame the film because the pitch itself is ridiculously over the top. On one hand, you have a supervillain named Chirag (Shabeer) who has a titanium-plated left arm. And on the other, we get Vidyut Jammwal playing Virat, a mega-villain who is less human, more fidget spinner.

A still from 'Madharaasi'

But the result is enjoyable, with kickass action blocks making way for highly entertaining dramatic sequences. My favourite was one that involves Raghu trying to find a mole operating out of a gang of police officers. This scene forebodes the need to be able to think emotionally, even if you are a well-trained senior officer, and at a point, Raghu compares himself to the watchdogs at airports that do not work for rank or money. And when the scene plays out, it’s Raghu’s animal instinct that makes him superior to all those brainy officers.

It’s incisively written, reminding one of Vijay’s emphatic speech about the mind of an army officer from Thuppakki and, by extension, we’re reminded once again of how great Murugadoss’ dialogues once were. And to be fair, Madharaasi isn’t too far behind, even if you want to read between the lines of the film’s politics.

It’s not uncommon for a Murugadoss movie villain to be an import of a hero from Bollywood, like we’d seen in Kaththi, Thuppakki, Darbar and Ghajini before this, but in Madharaasi, there’s the intention to paint the bad guys as obviously North Indian. Of course, the film itself is called Madharaasi, an offensive term used to deride all South Indians, but if you listen to the lines closely, it feels like the film isn’t just speaking about gun control and what it can do to Tamil Nadu. From the many hints, it sounds like the guns are just a placeholder for a brand of politics Tamilians should never allow entry into the state.

A still from 'Madharaasi'

But even if you’re not interested in that sort of reading, Madharaasi is dense with so many ideas that you never feel the need to look away or look at your phone. Along with Sudeep Elamon’s grungy, moody visuals, we also get to hear Anirudh’s music finally doing something totally new with this film. His music, after long, is happy to play the role of a supporting actor, without the need to overshadow what we see on screen. And for once, his music feels invisible at points, lifting the scenes only when it absolutely must.

Equal credits to the duo of Sivakarthikeyan and Biju Menon who respectively play the film’s heart and mind. If the former is allowed to play his role with all the bigness of a superstar, it’s because Biju Menon plants the film firmly within the realm of believability, making sure the film never goes overboard. And of course, it’s Murugadoss reclaiming his brand of cinema to its lost glory. Perhaps not nearly as perfect as his earlier films, but there’s just so much that’s going on in Madharaasi that it feels like the man’s regained his touch once again. After a movie like Sikandar, it’s good to see that the man has a few thousand punches left in him — at least enough ammunition to take its hero to a league above.