What is the story? Who is smuggling from whom? Why are there so many villains? Is Agilan, played by an always-grumpy Jayam Ravi, a criminal with a good heart, or is all his secretive do-gooding a counterbalance for his criminality? Why is everything happening to the soundtrack of a man growling gajagajagajagaaa gajagajagajagaaa very loudly the whole time? What does this person have to growl about? I felt like growling too, mainly in frustration. These are only a percentage of the head-spinning questions I have for director N Kalyanakrishnan after watching his latest Tamil release Agilan.
Actually, growling is the sole unifying theme of this movie, which can loosely be described as a story about a lot of smugglers working out of a harbour in Tamil Nadu and one eternally angry cop intent on stopping them. Agilan growls, all the many villains who come and go growl, the angry cop—Gokul Mehta (Harish Uthaman) growls, Agilan’s love interest Madhavi (Tanya Ravichandran) also growls, and even the songs seem to be delivered entirely in guttural snarls. I suppose it was intended to be menacing, but it’s not. I’d have laughed aloud in the theatre if I wasn't preoccupied with stringing together a coherent review about a movie that has so much of nothing.
None of the villains who come and go have any more impact than if they’d been playing bad-guy musical chairs. As for Agilan, he’s a part-time crane operator and a full-time ambitious smuggler. This is why we have an equal variety of shots of cargo containers being loaded and unloaded, as we do villains in this movie. Some of those shots are, no doubt, quite pretty given the pristine backdrop of the ocean, but from just how many angles can you shoot a large rectangular box before it becomes intolerably dull?
Throughout Agilan, we are given increasingly implausible reasons for the hero’s actions and by extension, that of Madhavi, who despite being a police inspector, is working with Agilan. The most baffling of them is the convoluted backstory our hero narrates involving his parents. One can accept why the director chose Jayam Ravi to play the father’s role in the flashback. Where one struggles to grasp the casting logic, is why Tanya Ravichandran had to play Agilan’s mother as well. His mother looked exactly like his girlfriend? What are we to understand from this, someone please explain.
The scenes where Jayam Ravi growls out his dialogues and pulls off heists, we are supposed to believe, verge on genius. When he’s not scheming or sounding like an angry bear, he’s scowling furiously at anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact with him. His face-off with Gokul Mehata is just two brutishly angry men snarling at each other, while you couldn’t care less who wins, because both are abrasive and illogical.
The rogues' gallery of villainy in the movie includes actors like Hareesh Peradi, Dheena, Tarun Arora, and Sai Tamil who played Meeraan in Sarpatta Parambarai. Apart from them, a star of Lal’s calibre is criminally wasted. Tanya Ravichandran, who plays a violent cop, has little to do other than support Agilan’s grand schemes. Between them, no one manages to convince you there is a tangible story somewhere in all the chaos. The fights, set to the near-omnipresent gajagajagaaah, are as bloody as they’re poorly choreographed.
Apart from all of this, there is a smattering of casual racism against Somali and Kenyan actors--nearly all of whom play smugglers. The director makes a half-hearted attempt to rectify it later in the story, but it is far from enough.
At the end of it, Agilan delivers (growls) a haphazard lecture on shipping economics to justify his smuggling. Far from being convinced about the morality of his intentions, we’re just glad to make a hurried exit from the movie theatre.
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 film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.