Madharaasi Review | A R Murugadoss Tries His Version of LCU and the Movie Lands in ICU

When you look at the Story idea of something like John Wick, there is this aspect that if that one guy had left the dog alone, none of this would have happened. As a one-liner, it might feel like a silly idea, and the franchise has shown us how something as simple as that can be the foundation of something grand. The aspiration of AR Murugadoss with his new movie Madharaasi is to mount a big-scale action film against the backdrop of possible gun violence, and his “dog” is the love Story of our hero. There are two main problems. One, the romance here is shallow, and it is as annoying as some of the earlier Sivakarthikeyan romantic movies. Two, the writing of the whole action part of the movie is ultra derivative. So, combining these two tracks to create a blood-dripping love Story gives a movie that is outright exhausting for the viewers.

Raghuram, aka Raghu, is our hero who has a mental health issue named Fregoli delusion. Because of what happened in his childhood, which made him an orphan, he tends to see his lost relatives in anyone who gets involved in any sort of accident. And it triggers him, and he helps all those people. So, what we see in Madharaasi is how this hyper-sensitive nature of this man becomes useful for the police force when they had to deal with a situation for which they weren’t fully prepared.

Well, Tamil cinema has been lured by the drug-free society LCU created by Lokesh Kanagaraj, and it seems like Murugadoss has decided to create his version of such a movie. If Lokesh was interested in making drugs as the foundation, AR Murugadoss decided to go with guns. Much like Inspector Bejoy from Kaithi, who conducted a large-scale operation and lost most of his men and had to seek help from Dilli, in Madharaasi, we have Biju Menon’s character in a similar situation, and he is using Raghu, who is basically a crybaby. While Dilli was eagerly waiting to see his daughter, our main man Raghu is a comical piece who just wants to die. I know that calling a man with suicidal tendencies a comical piece is not right. Well, you should say that to Mr. Murugadoss, who designed that character.

Sivakarthikeyan’s opening shot in the movie is the Salambala song, and looking at the silliness with which the whole love Story develops, you would actually end up hoping that this love track will end soon, and we will get to the action aspect of it. However, Murugadoss was using this thin romance as the foundation of all the action we see in the movie, and by the time the film ends, except for Raghu, everyone else will hate Malathy. The movie shows that Raghu is having mental health issues. But looking at the psychology of his lover, Malathy, I felt that she needs medicine. Mild Spoiler. So at one point, this obsessive helping mentality of Raghu, which happens due to delusion, stops because Malathy has sort of become his lost family. So Malathy decides to ghost him because she prefers the frantically helping, ill Raghu. And Murugadoss wants us to believe that this is a great love Story.

Sivakarthikeyan is struggling to live up to the aura the character demands. Like I said, the love this character has towards Malathy feels more like an obsession, and the way SK tries to bring a sense of innocence in the performance whenever Malathy is mentioned felt like an overdone act. When it comes to action, the problem is that there are patches in the movie where he has to make us believe that he can take down someone like Vidyut Jamwal. There are two action sequences in the film featuring Vidyut Jamwal, and he is absolutely breathtaking. And when Biju Menon says we will need more force to take down Virat (Vidyut’s character), it sounds believable. And then we have Sivakarthikeyan, who is doing a kip-up with the help of ropes. Rukmini Vasanth, as Malathy, has done her best to keep Malathy as real as possible. There is no overuse of cuteness or exaggerated acting here. But like I said, the script wasn’t giving her enough to perform. Biju Menon, as the mission chief, was perhaps cast in the movie following the ongoing trend of casting people from multiple industries. Shabeer Kallarakkal, Vikranth, etc., are the other names in the cast.

During the promotions of this movie, when Murugadoss was asked about what he would have done differently to improve his last few ventures, like Darbar and Sikandar. His response was that the script was fine, but he should have worked on the grandeur. And he also said that when working with stars, you need to give the fans the kind of things they are expecting from their star’s movie. In this movie, he starts the hero’s track with a breakup song, and I really feel that’s an outdated trope. When people in Tamil Nadu were celebrating Manjummel Boys, some of them had mockingly said that if this were made in Tamil, they would have added a heroine and there would be a dance number. The audience has definitely evolved, and Sivakarthikeyan’s last big hit, Amaran, didn’t have any of this fan service formula. When you look at the kind of stuff Murugadoss has written in this movie, you might feel that he is totally ignoring the fact that people have access to content on Netflix and Prime. I guess an anomaly like Good Bad Ugly is messing with the heads of big-ticket filmmakers. Sudeep Elamon has handled the cinematography of this movie, and his handheld approach in capturing moments, especially the fight sequences featuring Vidyut Jamwal, adds a sense of rawness to the unending fight. Anirudh’s work is perhaps the weakest in a long time, with none of the tracks really staying with you. There is hardly any space in the movie that has silences, and the final mix audio levels are so high that you can almost sense them covering up the lows of the film with excessive sound.

Looking at the kind of ideas AR Murugadoss had developed previously in his career, the thought of placing a mentally unstable over-empathetic man in the middle of a showdown and somebody tactically using his rage to get things done is definitely fascinating. The problem is that he is not changing the drama according to the evolution that has happened to the audience. There is a scene in the movie where Malathy tells Raghu the reason why she loves him despite knowing about his mental condition. Murugadoss thinks that what he has written would make the audience go “Aww!” But in reality, that was Eww-level cringe. The testament to the fact that Murugadoss has kind of lost his judgment is one of those final scenes in the movie where Biju Menon’s character says that the reason why Tamil Nadu is a gun-free, non-violent state is the love of Raghu and Malathy. If they had cut to black and played the famous Biju Menon audio “Chirikkalleda Potta”, I would have ignored all the other flaws and given it a standing ovation.