Star Cast: Sivakarthikeyan, Rukmini Vasanth, Vidyut Jammwal, Biju Menon, Shabeer Kallarakkal, Vikranth
Director: AR Murugadoss
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What’s Bad: A shaky storyline with a second half that makes no sense!
Loo Break: Anytime.
Watch or Not?: I am still processing!
Language: Dubbed in Hindi. Originally Tamil.
Available On: Theatrical release
Runtime: 2 hours and 40 minutes
User Rating:
The South Indian Cinema can be clearly divided into the Pre-Baahubali and post-Baahubali world! Pre-Baahubali, it was coming together of four film industries, but post-Baahubali, suddenly everything turned pan-India, with North Indian audiences rooting for South Indian content and Cinema! The latest offering is a Tamil film, Madharaasi, which has been dubbed in Hindi as Dil Madharaasi. Starring Sivakarthikeyan along with Biju Menon, Rukmini Vasanth, and Vidyut Jammwal, the action film is helmed by AR Murugadoss!
Now, as a North Indian audience, I know Sivakarthikeyan for Amaran, and I know AR Murugadoss for Ghajini! So my expectations from their film would be nothing short of these masterpieces! But does their new film pass the parameters – my clear answer would be No! Why? I will explain that in detail point by point!
The story of Dil Madharaasi can be dissected into two parallel plots – there is Sivakarthikeyan as a man with a mental disorder, who falls in love with Rukmini Vasanth and his life turns upside down, when she decides to leave him for an absolutely bizarre reason, I can’t disclose! But as they say, women are equally weird as men when it comes to relationships!
So, after the heartbreak, Sivakarthikeyan’s character Raghu wants to die, because obviously that is the only solution for a dil toota ashiq! However, on the way to his suicide attempt, he bumps into Biju Menon, an officer in NIA, who has been massively hurt during an operation! Since Biju does not want to lose any more men from his team, he hires Raghu for a task, because Raghu wants to die! Wait, this will get more bizarre, I promise!
Now, Raghu, a civilian (and a mental disorder patient), is handling one of the toughest missions of the NIA, because their senior-most officer does not want any of them to die! Raghu, fights the villain – an absolutely terrific Vidyut Jammwal, who holds the screen better than any other villain in any of the recent films I’ve seen, and this face off looks weird because I will not believe in 10 rebirths that Vidyut can be pinned down by Sivakarthikeyan. Sorry SK, but someone needs to say this!
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Sivakarthikeyan struggles but manages to hold the film. Vidyut Jammwal as the antagonist is a winner despite his limited screen presence. The rest of the cast looks lost in a story that is trying to make sense, but doesn’t most of the time!
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Honestly, the movie sets the premise in an interesting way and I put my hopes on AR Murugadoss since he knows how to set non-linear narratives brilliantly. He did that in Ghajini. But, he loses control of the story, after paving a good path till the first half! As much as he is to blame for this content mismanagement, he also needs to be blamed for trusting way too much in the music of the film! I agree that Anirudh is a magician, but this film seems like that one magic trick that misfired! There are 3 songs in the first 35 – 45 minutes of the film, and all three of them made no sense to me!
In fact, I have a new found respect for Pushpa, since their Hindi songs should be a masterclass on how to dub and recreate bilingual songs! The Hindi writing, meter, and everything else were bizarre when it came to the music of the film!
While the film clearly had two parallel plots – a love story and an illegal syndicate taking over Tamil Nadu and destroying it, the latter turned into a secondary plot with the former love plot not doing anything substantial except for taking up screen space! While the first half entirely focussed on Raghu and Malathi’s prem kahani setting up the syndicate plot in tits and bits, the second half of the film lost the plot entirely!
The most useless thing in this film was NIA led by Biju Menon, because clearly they had no idea what they were up to! AR Murugadoss, in an attempt to carve a hero out of Sivakarthikeyan’s mental disorder patient Raghu, got so lost that he made one of the most reputed security agencies look like a bunch of stupid men roaming around with guns and doing nothing except waiting and following a civilian to do their job!
I lost my patience with this film the moment a Gunda said, “Ladka aur uski chhamiya idhar hai!” I mean, it is 2025, and if South Indian films and their makers still think that North Indian gundas are using slang like Chhamiya, then I am sure it would take way too long to bridge the gap, no matter how much we call these films pan-India films! And I need to address this because the moment a Kerala woman in a North Indian film starts doing Kathakali and shreds coconut, the entire Malayali community has an emotional meltdown! No, our gundas, do not call our women Chhamiya! In fact, I am not sure, except for the 80’s where everything was exaggerated by the iconic villains Ranjit and Shakti Kapoor, anyone else in Hindi films has also used the word Chhamiya!
Anyway, moving forward, Dil Madharaasi, after losing the entire plot, makes a civilian lead an NIA mission, shows that the NIA man is so irresponsible and insensitive that despite being told that the mental disorder patient is not taking his medicines and it is dangerous, he does not react or respond, and makes Vidyut Jammwal look very charming in his fight scenes, but still lose, because obviously he is the villain. The film ends vaguely, and I clearly do not even remember how, because by the time it ended, my brain stopped processing things!
Right before the ending, the civilian mental patient Sivakarthikeyan kills a man with multiple gunshots and runs to find his love. In the very next scene, the almost dead man tries to move his hand, and the entire NIA team makes a circle and shoots him for 10 seconds! They needed 10 men to shoot an almost dead man! Good!
Cut to the finale act, when NIA actually reaches the main godown of this gun syndicate for the final confrontation, where Sivakarthikeyan and Vidyut Jammwal have already almost killed each other, Biju Menon, the NIA Chief, politely asks the security guard to open the door! Wait what?! The guard refuses to do so, and this NIA chief just stands, doing nothing!
Okay, I am too tired to rant anymore! My brain is tired. I think even AR Murugadoss is tired after making Sikandar! But hey, Sivakarthikeyan, Chhamiya dialogues in a hindi dub with bizarre Hindi songs are clearly not making you a pan-India star any time soon!
2 stars.
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