Jana Nayagan review: the goodbye outgrows the movie

No Tamil star has ever left the stage like this. Jana Nayagan arrives with its lead actor already running the state, which makes the release feel less like a movie event than a transfer-of-power ceremony with popcorn. Somewhere inside the noise sits an actual film, one that fought its way past the censors just to exist, and the honest question is whether it needed to be good at all. The crowd came pre-sold. The review is for everyone else.

The bones are borrowed from Bhagavanth Kesari, the 2023 Balakrishna film. Vetri Kondan (Vijay), an ex-cop with a prison stint behind him, raises Viji (Mamitha Baiju), his late friend’s daughter, and pushes her toward the army while she wrestles with panic attacks. Kayal (Pooja Hegde), a journalist, helps him dig into the wrong people. Across the board sits John Himler (Bobby Deol), an arms dealer whose plans involve more hardware than any Tamil villain has fielded in years.

For about ninety minutes, this is sturdier than the trailers suggested. H Vinoth lets the guardian-daughter thread breathe, a classroom scene about safe and unsafe touch is handled with genuine care, and the buildup into the interval properly cooks. The flashback that opens the second half is the best stretch in the movie, the one passage where the director of Theeran is recognisably on duty: harder staging, cleaner emotion, no begging for applause.

The guardian-and-daughter thread is the film’s best material, and both its leads seem to know it.

Vijay gives the film more than it gives him. He is visibly more engaged as the younger Vetri, sharp in the confrontations, and fully switched on even when the writing coasts. Mamitha Baiju matches him scene for scene, selling both the panic attacks and the fight choreography, and their portions together, the bond that Adiye En Poonthene promised, are the closest the film comes to feeling lived-in. Bobby Deol is an interesting casting swing, with an unhinged glint most imported villains never manage, but he is handed close to an hour of screen time and barely one memorable thing to do with it. Pooja Hegde’s Kayal at least has a job in the plot; an inner life would have been asking too much.

Then the film starts adding things. Terrorism, tribal land, communal harmony, corporate loot: every issue gets a scene, every scene gets a speech, and the story stops moving so the messaging can. By the last act it has talked itself into a full technology showcase, drone swarms and humanoid robots stomping through a climax that belongs to a sillier movie. Stranger still, Vijay sits out long portions of it. His own farewell keeps parking him off-screen while machines fight. The effects cannot cash the cheque either; parts of Himler’s backstory montage have the smeared, weightless look of AI-generated footage, a bewildering corner to cut at this budget.

The deeper problem is that the movie treats its hero exactly the way the crowd outside does. Characters exist to announce him, an entire village worships him, and he gets what amounts to an introduction scene every fifteen minutes. When a hero cannot lose, a villain cannot threaten, and three hours is a long time to watch certainty. The bruises land elsewhere: Viji absorbs an uncomfortable amount of punishment, and deaths that should hurt are hustled past on the way to the next slow-motion entrance.

Anirudh Ravichander’s work is effective in the hall and forgettable outside it, which by his Vijay standards is its own verdict. Sathyan Sooryan keeps finding handsome frames for a film that rarely knows what to do with them. So here is the split. As a communal theatre event, the send-off delivers: the title card, the final dance, the roar. As cinema, nearly everything inherited from the Telugu source holds up, and nearly everything invented for this version wobbles. 2.5/5, most of it for the man leaving and the young actor he leaves the screen to.