After the success of his 2023 actioner, Mark Antony, actor Vishal must have sat and imagined a follow-up masala film that would best the Adhik Ravichandran directorial. I say this with confidence because his latest film, Magudam

The father-son double action in Mark Antony? Take it, and retain those colourful costumes and some quirks. Is seaport smuggling involved? Okay, but too many such films about drug and ammunition smuggling have come out. Change it to duplicate automobile parts that cause many fatal accidents — we also get something resembling a message. Now, add some token fem-rage for good measure; something for family audiences, right? Give the father character a Robin Hood-esque gangster flashback. Let the son have a Thevar Magan-esque arc. Voila! You have Magudam (meaning ‘crown’ in Tamil). Oh wait, why leave Ilaiyaraaja? Let’s use his songs randomly to become the one-millionth Tamil film in recent times to nostalgia-bait. If you haven’t caught the drift yet, this three-hour-long gangster saga is a terribly contrived and amateurish actioner.

Even if you were to cut some slack for this being a debutant director’s film, you would expect an experienced actor like Vishal to understand the audience’s pulse or at least be aware of trite ideas that Tamil cinema has long abandoned. Do we still think a shot of a woman belting a meal is funny? This is the only characteristic that Dushara Vijayan’s character, Jamuna, gets; every time she eats, her husband, Vishal’s Kirubakaran, goes, ‘Indha mukku mukkuraale,’ and we are expected to laugh. Thambi Ramaiah’s presence inspires Vishal to write lame Tamil puns like ‘Oil - aayul,’ ‘number - numbrathu,’ or ‘emathuradhu - yen maathuradhu’, and it gets tiring quickly.

Magudam (Tamil)

Director: Vishal

Cast: Vishal, Dushara Vijayan, Anjali, John Vijay

Runtime: 185 minutes

Storyline: A middle-class medical representative’s life takes a violent turn when a personal tragedy draws him into the shadowy legacy of his estranged gangster father.

Magudam is also one of the worst-edited films in recent times — something you wouldn’t expect from NB Srikanth. After a tiring day as a medical rep, Kirubakaran comes home to his angry wife. We get individual shots of him switching off his bike, removing his shoes, adjusting his tie, washing his hands, and settling to eat. In a different film, you might mistake this as an intentional and realistic depiction of one of the most satisfying moments of a hard-working middle-class man’s day; but Magudam was never meant to be that film. In fact, you wonder why, for over 40 unnecessarily stretched-out minutes, we follow the harsh realities of a middle-class man’s dream to buy a car, only for it to go absolutely nowhere. One imagines this might have to do with that whole ‘message’ at the climax about illegal imports of automobile parts, but the two-and-a-half-hour-long gangster plot between these two ideas begs to differ.

The story is essentially a demonstration of the infamous dead-wife trope — we see Kiruba suffer a tragedy that unleashes his inner beast, after which we get a flashback about how Kiruba’s father, Linga, became a dreadful don controlling the Visakhapatnam port. It doesn’t take much to guess that Anjali, who plays Kiruba’s mother and Linga’s wife, Annapoorani, dies in the flashback, but how this transpires is another mind-numbing affair.

This is a film with terrible scene staging. What was the whole point of prolonging Linga’s face reveal in a scene that runs for so long? We get it — Vishal sports a new look — now can we please move on?

In the second half, Vishal attempts to bring some emotional gravitas by using a tape recorder as a Macguffin. Unfortunately, even that becomes ineffective because you never understand why Linga chooses to distance himself from his son. None of the villains feels like a real threat, and after a point, nothing makes sense anymore. A climax with a lot of shouting, guns, katanas, daggers, and cringeworthy dialogues seals the deal and places the magudam on Magudam as one of the most tedious masala films of the year.

Over three long hours, Magudam manages to do something many bad films couldn’t: make film-watching feel like a punishment.

Magudam is currently running in theatres

Published - August 14, 2026 11:30 pm IST