Almost every aspiring filmmaker might have had this wish of doing an action movie where the hero is in a different land, fighting mighty villains, doing all the exotic stunts like jumping from buildings, crashing cars, etc. And if you try to build a story around that wish, the conviction factor will bother you because our kind of stories doesn’t fit into such a mold. Director S U Arun Kumar who collaborates with Vijay Sethupathi for the third time acknowledges the films that made him do Sindhubaadh at the end of the film. But rather than picking all the set pieces in the movies that inspired him, Arun Kumar fails to give an identity to Sindhubaadh and you will find this movie as an exhausting thriller with a lot of randomness and predictability.
Thiru and Super is the hero and the sidekick respectively. They are robbers. At one point Thiru meets this girl named Venba who has this outspoken eccentric nature. The love story eventually blossoms and by that time Venba had to go back to Thailand for her job to repay all the debts created by her uncle. But in that journey Venba faces trouble and the movie shows us how Thiru decides to save her from a huge nexus of human trafficking.
Arun Kumar is a director who sort of gave that believable tweak to the typical mass movie formula; Sethupathy is a really good example of that. When it comes to Sindhubaadh, his ambitions are really high and the problem is that he is simply going after set pieces. In one scene, Thiru is running while carrying Super on his shoulders and Super manages to shoot down a car with a catapult. I would have been okay with such nonsense if I saw that scene in a Siva movie or a Hari movie. But it is really heartbreaking to see such levels of pretentious imagination in a SU Arun Kumar film. There is one more scene of Vijay Sethupathi jumping from building to another building. Even the climax fight sequence has this feeling of absolute chaos rather than a planned, well-choreographed sequence.
Vijay Sethupathi repeats his usual mixing of comical and heroic expressions. The actor has this likable hero persona and also he can shift from a very simple human being to a conventional mass hero without a jitter. Anjali manages to equal the madness the couple shares on screen. Vijay Sethupathi’s son Surya plays the role of Super and he was kind of adorable. Linga was okay as the always screaming one-dimensional villain.
Lazy and random writing is what disturbs the entire movie. They are not trying to make things look convincing at any point. The antagonists here don’t have a story or even a solid identity. The second half is randomly throwing problems at our hero so that he can show the “mass”. The ironic thing was that the relatively smaller second half of this movie felt like a never-ending exhausting action sequence. Like Sethupathy, Arun Kumar does try to infuse a little bit of practicality into clichéd moments, but here the randomness was so extreme that it wasn’t enough to make the movie an exciting one. The cinematography has the texture of a large scale action movie, but the editing was a mess, especially in key stunts. Yuvan Shankar Raja’s music was catchy while the background score felt like a very usual one.
Sitting through Sindhubaadh, I was constantly getting this feeling that the effort went into the writing of this movie was really on the lower side. There is nothing wrong in getting inspired by classic Hollywood action flicks and paying a tribute to them. But it shouldn’t end up like a half baked binge watch of all the action set pieces.
There is nothing wrong in getting inspired by classic Hollywood action flicks and paying a tribute to them. But it shouldn’t end up like a half baked binge watch of all the action set pieces.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
