‘Shakthi Thirumagan’ Movie Review: Many Ideas But Little Spark In Vijay Antony’s Vigilante Drama

Vijay Antony’s Kittu is a deliriously fun character in Arun Prabu’s Shakthi Thirumagan. He works for the government of Tamil Nadu as a mediator, which in colloquial parlance is a ‘broker’ and in unsavoury-speak, a ‘pimp’, as the film constantly informs through its runtime. He is a generous bandit for the poor and a scamming trickster for the rich, who swindles over 6,000 crores from the government, all with an innocent smile plastered on his face. Now, the likes of Shankar have tried this formula in varying but engaging aspects in Tamil cinema (Gentleman and Mudhalvan are the gold standard). Arun Prabu puts his own spin on this with spiffy editing and smart staging of complex chains of events in the screenplay. This modern-day Robin Hood story is fun to start with, but the effect doesn’t last.

A still from 'Shakthi Thirumagan'

Like every troubled character leading these vigilante films, Kittu has a past (Vaagai Chandrasekar gets a sweet, important role here). But Shakthi Thirumagan doesn’t dwell too much on it — for its own good. But a past that has left him cold, angry and mechanical. And Prabu runs wild with this character detail. He marries and makes a family just to get more people to write off black money into white, goes on a “honeymoon” just to scheme with an MLA to take down a person in power, and looks at every person around him as an instrument that will eventually come in handy. 

Vijay Antony, who is already known for portraying the uncharacteristically calm common man in films, is well-cast as Kittu here. At any given point, we hardly know what’s going on in his head, and for the most part, this creates intrigue. The film, interestingly, hardly relies on heightened drama to underline a scene — a quality that is otherwise a common marker with films of this sort. When someone who paid him 200 crores for a shady service, sheepishly asks for a cut of the money back, we expect a big fight sequence. Instead, he simply says, “Of course I will. I’m just a broker at the end of the day.”

A still from 'Shakthi Thirumagan'

Arun Prabu infuses moments of freshness to a genre that’s familiar and formative to Tamil cinema. This offsets a lot of the overt plotting in Shakthi Thirumagan. But the newness eventually runs thin. It also doesn’t help its case that the film’s antagonist is a presumptuous lobbyist and popular political advisor, who painfully flits between high-brow English and Brahminical Tamil. The dialogue is heavily stilted and at points unintentionally comical (who would take a villain who refers to his own hands as “holy hands” on multiple occasions, seriously?). The eat-the-rich arc is fleshed out well, accompanied by important takes on caste and religion. But when the ideas get too much, the film loses the plot.

Aside from Cell Murugan, who gets a decent role as Kittu’s perennially confused sidekick, the film doesn’t leave much scope for any development in characters. It’s a Kittu’s show through and through. But this also means the film stacks one scam on top of another in his repertoire, leaving him alone to manoeuvre it. When the sermonising begins and you see that the film whips out the overused sentimental montage where petrol contamination and farmer suicides are furiously discussed in the same breath, the Tamil cinema fan in you immediately knows where things are heading.