It’s easy to see why Shankar wanted to bring back the Indian thatha. In 1996, Shankar gave Tamil cinema a vigilante hero to talk about issues that chip away at our country — this went on to become a trope, with directors emulating Senapathi with their own stock vigilante heroes. The India of 2024 is different from the India of 1996. The world is more polarised than ever before today, but the director chooses to focus on the issues that have remained the same — corruption, medical negligence, educational fraud and so on.
But even if the world in the film has moved on — we have AI standing in for the brilliance of actors such as Nedumudi Venu, incredible prosthetic and makeup work to make a centenarian look cool, and polished stunts — the treatment remains terribly conventional. Elaborate scenes and monologues (was Senapathi ever so chatty?) are stitched up to make this 100-something messiah cool, while the film forgets the one thing that actually made him unique: his personality.
