40 minutes into the three-hour-long Magudam, you feel like there’s almost nothing you’ve been told that matters to the larger plot. You’re introduced to a medical representative named Kripa and his family, and told repeatedly about their middle-class desire to buy a car. It’s info the film could have conveyed with one succinctly written dialogue, but Magudam hammers this point into our heads with sentimental scenes, a cringy family song about this dream and the most gnawingly dated comedy scenes led by Thambi Ramiah. It becomes clear as day that this car is going to be important to the plot, but given the amount of time it takes to keep droning on about it, you begin to expect a twist so original that you imagine M Night Shyamalan shifting base to Saligramam to live closer to Vishal.
But the film's invention ends with just one newish idea. It’s a film about mistaken identity involving two look-alikes — one bad and one good. Doesn’t sound new? It’s also a film about a car that ends up with two kinds of people — one good and one bad. For the most part, the only reason you keep waiting to see what happens is to find out why two characters (Lingaa and Kripa) look the same. Are they twins? Are they siblings? Is Lingaa Kripa’s father? Or do they share the same father?
Whatever the answer may be, it’s unlikely you’re going to be surprised by it. There’s not a single frame or dialogue in Magudam that feels original. Everything feels like a copy of a copy of a hundred movies you’ve been watching for decades. Take the case of something as basic as Kripa’s big transformation scene. He has played the role of a cowardly bumpkin for most of the first half, and you’re sure as hell that it’s all leading towards his explosion.
But even these scenes mirror Vishal’s own performance from his own films such as Pandiya Naadu and Naan Sigappu Manithan. And for all his obsession with action, the least you expect is a clever new way of exposition, at least in the staging of the action scenes. But even this is just the same; If they’d taken the trouble of asking Claude for a clever idea, chances are that the AI assistant could have suggested something far better, even without having to pay for a subscription.
But the film only gets duller as it enters the second half. The setting shifts to Andhra in the 80s, and this gives the film an unending license to fill each frame with the most obvious-looking wigs; the younger version of Lingaa feels like a lazy rehash of the character he played in his hit Mark Antony. And yet what continues to keep the film almost unwatchable is how long it takes to get to its point. An emotional scene written around an important character’s murder takes at least 10 minutes longer than it should have, and the film does this repeatedly, assuming the audience is going to be with it all along.
There’s nothing in Magudam to justify its three-hour runtime. Vishal’s last release was the surprise hit Madha Gaja Raja. It’s a film that was released after lying in the cans for 13 years. In his effort to repeat that film’s success, Vishal seems to have tried to make a film that feels like it’s been lying in the cans for at least twice as long.