Magudam review: three Vishals, one tired script

Magudam gives you three Vishals for the price of one ticket: a young hoodlum clawing his way up the Visakhapatnam docks, the silver-bearded don he grows into, and the estranged son who wants nothing more dangerous out of life than a family car. That is the ambition. The trouble is that all three men are stuck inside a script every one of them could predict scene by scene.

Kirubakaran is a Chennai medical rep scraping by with his wife Jamuna (Dushara Vijayan) and two kids, while a father-in-law measures his worth in car ownership. In Visakhapatnam, Linga bhai lords over the shipping business and collects enemies faster than cargo ships. When a rival spots a man in Ooty wearing the don’s exact face, an old feud comes looking for the son who fled it, and the two tracks finally collide at the interval. That is also the film admitting its actual story needs ninety minutes of throat-clearing before it starts.

The small stuff works better than the big stuff. The passage where Kiruba’s family trudges through car showrooms, absorbing one polite humiliation after another, carries more sting than any of the bloodshed. And Dushara, underused once already this year in Kattalan, plays Jamuna with a level head the film badly needs.

The flashback romance gives Anjali her liveliest minutes, before the plot forgets her.

But the debits pile up fast. The story, credited to Ravi Arasu, is the kind of don-and-estranged-son revenge saga Tamil cinema retired decades ago, and the film does nothing to update it. Comedy tracks stall the first half, the domestic scenes between Vishal and Dushara are stiffly written, and both women, Dushara and Anjali, end up as furniture the plot rearranges. Chapter cards divide the film as if the structure were intricate; it isn’t. Moments are engineered for whistles, right down to an army of fisherwomen joining a brawl, and land without one. At 185 minutes, the comic detours and delayed reveals make the runtime impossible to ignore.

The gunplay has energy to spare; it’s the connective tissue between the set pieces that sags.

Vishal the actor fares better than Vishal the writer. He gives the aged Linga a guarded weariness that Kiruba never gets, even if the makeup wobbles in close-up. G.V. Prakash Kumar’s background score props up scene after scene, and the climax, one unbroken eight-minute stretch of action, is the film’s best passage, arriving three hours too late.

Magudam ends with proof that Vishal can stage action with conviction. What it never shows is why this story, of all the ones he could have picked for a debut he fought this hard to finish, needed him to tell it.