Bearded, unkempt, brash, and smoking, the Tamil film hero is no obvious object of desire—they get sloppy drunk; you see them waking up hungover; they romance reluctantly, and then recklessly; their lips are cracked, their skin discoloured; if you kiss them, your skin might scrape off; grooming is unbecoming.
Charisma, then, is what elevates them to heroism, that ephemeral star quality of re-framing even bad breath as a sign of a night spent sleeping under the stars. The actor Soori, whose very visage is an image of innocence, stepping into this heroism in Mandaadi, plays this charismatic abrasiveness as sincere and patient—this is not collar-up coolness, but button-up kindness. Soori, after stepping away from comedic gaffes and supporting characters, has embraced being the central, impregnable presence in films like Viduthalai (2023-24), Kottukkaali (2024), and now Mandaadi.
He plays Kaali, a man working as a lifeguard at a water park in Chennai. It is a life of ennui, cleaning pools and minding crowds. I wish the film revelled in these moments, drawing out a hollow sense of time, but the film moves swiftly. It prefers to establish, not engage. Even beautiful images are never held, quickly swapped for the next.
It is clear that Kaali has been exiled from his village—for his safety, but mostly for his sanity. Something traumatic happened there, and the first half is pregnant with this question, desperate for a flashback.
As always, it is someone from the succeeding generation who needles this memory. Back home, the boat racing competition has been taken over by Sattapuli (Suhas) and his menacing son. They prefer to recruit people from outside the village for the team, instead of picking up talented kids from their own village. This rubs Maari (Mithun Jai Sankar) the wrong way, who attacks Sattapuli’s son and flees to Chennai, taking refuge in Kaali. Maari doesn’t know Kaali’s backstory. He only knows that this man will pave him a path forward.
Sattapuli’s men are on the hunt. Instead of living a life as an eternal exile, Kaali takes Maari back home. Instead of a violent altercation, they decide to fight it out in the seas: a boat racing competition. Kaali has to strap together a team from the village boys and train them in around a month. This is the framing of the film — a fallen hero’s shirking return. First, recruitment montage. Then, training montage.
It is the boat racing—and the film’s promotions, noting its IMAX release—that offer a new turn to the familiar tale. And for the most part, this promise is pulsating, the scenes at sea capturing the choppy waves and the shifting winds. However, it is the film that takes shape around the two big boat-racing sequences that begin to feel arthritic in their predictable stride.
The “Baashha formula” has ruined Tamil films because the entire first half feels like a reluctant film—a film searching for its origin story. With Mandaadi, there is a propulsive quality that helps sail through the often tiresome pregnancy of the first half. But the predictability sours—just give birth already.
Sattapuli (Suhas) is an interesting antagonist, for he was once Kaali’s closest friend. But what is this friendship? The film is content with Sattapuli’s villainy; it refuses to build the friendship into anything more than an excuse to unravel the plot. Where is the brotherhood? Why does Kaali feel this breathtaking and sacrificial sense of love for him? When Kaali is betrayed, the betrayal’s power is dominated by its predictability. The film is coasting on beats that we can see approaching from nautical miles away.
Just as the friendship is assumed, so Kaali’s love, too, is assumed. Angel (Mahima Nambiar) takes that tentative spot. Mandaadi makes no effort to build that love as anything except the thing that can unravel. It is efficient about these plot points, preferring to be indulgent about the action and close-ups instead, which stretch out in long, long scenes. Why is violence more compelling to a storyteller than character? Action is also where the score, by GV Prakash, kicks in, drumming feelings under the skin of the film until you can feel nothing else.
This might seem like I am nitpicking, but the film’s emotional stakes are so simplistic, it feels like it has picked the easier race to run—and is content with that victory. Mandaadi keeps toeing its predictable plot till the climactic boat race—which summons not just the arms and legs, but also whirlpools and deceitful anchors and back-room allies—until the race itself becomes irrelevant. It becomes an excuse to hang the film’s drama on, which itself is an excuse to hang the action on. Circular reasoning, tail eating head, what else is new in commercial Tamil cinema?