Sigma review: Jason Sanjay's debut looks good but runs long

The hero of Sigma is a librarian, which is the most interesting thing about him and the thing the film does least with. Guru (Sundeep Kishan) keeps his late mother’s crumbling library open, records audiobooks for a YouTube channel nobody seems to watch, and owes moneylenders the crore his father borrowed. Sam (Faria Abdullah), an RJ whose father’s antique shop is dying, needs money too. Both are clinging to something a parent left behind, a neat rhyme the film never develops. Somewhere abroad sits a vault of cash belonging to the smuggler Veerayya Reddy (Sampath Raj), and the key to it is passing between a casino owner (Shiv Panditt), a drug peddler and an assortment of double-crossers.

Everything after that comes off the shelf. An antique-looking key, a pen drive everybody wants, a nightclub that doubles as a drug den, a crew in Bruce Lee and Donald Trump masks and a silent assassin with a one-letter name. Jason Sanjay, debuting with a budget most first-timers only dream of, puts the pieces together competently. He never makes them his own, and the filmmaking is as familiar as the story it tells.

It also takes its time. The opening stretch keeps re-establishing a debt that was clear from the start, and the heist the poster promises arrives so late that the second half has to circle the same handful of double-crosses to fill the runtime. Guru’s friends Dr Neil (Raju Sundaram) and Kavithai Ganesh (Anbu Thasan) are pitched for laughs that never come. The villains bark without menace, so nothing ever feels at stake. Guru’s dog is killed off and the film moves on almost at once. An item number with Catherine Tresa scolds viewers about objectifying women while the camera does precisely that.

There are things to like. Sundeep Kishan plays Guru with an earnest, slightly harried decency that keeps you on his side long after the plot stops giving you reasons to be. Krishnan Vasant’s warm lighting makes the library and the casino look expensive, which they presumably were. A fight inside an automated multi-level car park hints at the inventive action film Sigma could have been, even if it is over too soon and the sidekick throws most of the punches. Guru is also at his most likeable when he is outthinking someone, as with a well-placed spy camera, and the film could have used far more of that and far fewer slow-motion entrances.

A man who has spent his life among his mother’s books should recognise this plot within a chapter. Sigma never gives him, or us, a reason to keep turning the pages.