Pichaikkaran 2 begins with the slogan ‘Money is injurious to the world’. Logically then, the film should be about how money destroys those who have it, but the entire film is about how amazing life can be when you have wealth and how terrible it is when you don’t have it. As slogans go, it’s safe to say that this one misses the mark by a mile.

The first Pichaikkaran (2016), directed by Sasi and starring Vijay Antony, was about a rich man who lives as a beggar because a sage tells him that this will help him save his mother who is in a coma. Pichaikkaran 2 is directed by Vijay Antony himself – and follows pretty much the same formula, except this time he’s a beggar who has to live as a rich man because a sage tells him that this will help him find his sister who was trafficked as a child. If anyone’s in a coma, it’s the audience.

Vijay (Vijay Antony) is an extremely rich business tycoon (I forget how many zeroes are there in his bank balance) who has a fiancee named Hema (Kavya Thapar). Vijay likes to slap and humiliate Kavya in front of others while she’s in the habit of performing gymnastics on his boat because it supposedly looks sexy. Vijay is surrounded by some Very Bad People – a CEO (Dev Gill), a doctor (Hareesh Peradi), and another leery associate (John Vijay) – who decide that the best way to grab his wealth is to swap his brain with that of another man they can easily control. This other man is Sathya, who is a beggar, and is also played by Vijay Antony with some bad makeup.

I thought longingly of Kamal Haasan in Singeetam Srinivasa Rao’s Michael Madana Kama Rajan (1990) where a lookalike replaces a rich man. Imagine taking that premise that was mined for comic gold and turning it into something so utterly bland and boring. Pichaikkaran 2 is the kind of film where you’ll find a shot of a poor woman with flies in her mouth to underline the point that there is abject poverty in this country, and then three more such shots that tell us that there is abject poverty in this country. The screenplay is like an earnest schoolteacher who revises the portions 10 times in case her students forget the main points. Here, there is only one point and it is that there is abject poverty in this country – in case you missed it.

Pichaikkaran 2 is also the kind of film where there are several triggering shots and dialogues on sexual violence thrown in. But it’s also the kind of film that has an item number and dialogues that treat ‘ponnunga’ as objects to be enjoyed. This is so common in Tamil cinema that one wonders if it’s even worth mentioning in a review any more. But in a film that sits so high on a moral horse that the horse must be wearing a spacesuit, it deserves to be called out.

The ‘simple’ solution at the heart of Pichaikkaran 2 is that the rich should just give away their money to the poor. In other words, if they don’t have bread, we shall give them cake and everything will be okay. It’s perhaps too much to ask that a film of this mould looks at the caste, class, and gender dynamics of poverty, but the least it could have done is to afford the poor some dignity. Instead, the film actually mocks the poor, with Yogi Babu playing a beggar who orders his meals from Buhari on his cellphone.

While there’s a lot of empty rhetoric on poverty, some crucial plot threads are left hanging. The CEO’s father supposedly died because of Vijay’s father – but why and how did the two boys remain friends? No clue. There is an important reunion that happens in the end with a missing person – but how was the person found, what happened to them all these years? No idea. There is an embarrassing courtroom scene where a highly complex case is heard, the verdict given, and wrapped up all in the same session. In which universe is all this happening?

The film makes lavish use of VFX to impersonate the lavish lifestyle of the rich. From boardrooms to skyscrapers in Dubai and millions of people (seriously, it’s the population of India and China together) at a shiny mall, everything looks fake. There are also two snakes that appear on screen for no good reason. Vijay Antony can kick and throw a punch, but he struggles with emoting and resorts to holding his hands in front of his eyes when he has to cry. The two child actors and Mansoor Ali Khan, however, occasionally remind us that this is a film and not a poster for Garibi Hatao.

Poverty is, of course, a relevant subject but unfortunately the astounding laziness with which Vijay proceeds to tell this story only exposes the poverty of his imagination. He milks every frame to drive home the same point again and again – so much so that I was left wondering why the director was credited as Vijay Antony and not Vijay Antimoney.

Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the producers or any other members of its cast and crew.

Sowmya Rajendran writes on gender, culture, and cinema. She has written over 25 books, including a nonfiction book on gender for adolescents. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for her novel Mayil Will Not Be Quiet in 2015.