The Greatest of All Time by Venkat Prabhu is a wannabe film that tries too hard to be this Mission Impossible kind of film. The problem is that the script has certain bullet points for the story to move from one point to another. But the writing is struggling to move things smoothly. On top of all that, Venkat Prabhu has the burden of making this film a fan service package that caters to all segments of the audience. With a scripting pattern that is familiar and twists that aren’t that surprising, rather than some scattered moments of heroic dialogues in the film’s last quarter, this Vijay starrer is ultimately an underwhelming package.
SPOILER ALERT! MS Gandhi is a SATS agent (Special Anti-Terrorist Squad). We are shown in the opening sequence of the film how he and his team busted a terrorist group carrying uranium. The agent life of Gandhi comes to an end when his son dies during one of his missions in Bangkok. After several years, when he went to Moscow to handle a situation, he happened to meet his son Jeevan, who looked exactly like him. The changes that happened in Gandhi’s life after the re-entry of Jeevan are what we see in The Greatest of All Time.
Almost from the word go, GOAT is very frail. The Dhoom 2 meets Mission Impossible train mission of the gang has tacky visual effects, and seeing Vijayakanth was as difficult as watching AI-generated Nedumudi Venu in Indian 2. After that, when the movie decides to slip into a lighter space with dance numbers and WhatsApp humor, none of them gel with the core story. The interval twist that has both Vijays pitted against one another felt extremely predictable, and when the movie goes to the second half, the scripting’s broad strokes get the company of age-old cliches. Towards the climax, there are these self-boasting dialogues from Gandhi, and that were the only relief points even if you approach this film as a Vijay fan service.
The movie is weak in terms of having a strong plot. The duel Venkat Prabhu has staged in this film lacks depth. When it was difficult to make the audience believe why would Jeevan blindly believe another man and go against his own father, Venkat Prabhu introduced a memory loss theory to justify it. It’s like you expect something solid from the man who created Maanaadu, but Venkat Prabhu will remind you that his filmography has tacky films too. The movie is CGI-heavy, and I must say that the flick has too much of a tacky green screen. In most of the double role sequences, we can clearly see which version of Vijay was pasted on the original footage because of the lighting inconsistencies.
The de-aging done to Vijay was a major talking point once the promos were out, as the Amal Davis look of the younger Vijay received a lot of flak. During promotions, Archana Kalpathi said that good CGI is something where you won’t feel it has been done using visual effects, and if I use that statement as a measure to evaluate the quality of the visual effects, the quality is poor. The execution of the whole bike sequence in the final moments of the film was extremely terrible for a 380-crore budget film. Vijay is someone who looks pretty young in a clean-shaven look. When I saw the film, I thought rather than de-aging the existing version to create a younger version, they should have aged the current version to something like the screen age of Rajinikanth in Jailer to create that contrast. The editing was a mess as far too many cuts in many sequences make it too chaotic. The songs were underwhelming, and to make it worse, the placement of the “Spark” song was horrendously bad. A close friend of the father of the couple was found dead, but the couple had different priorities.
The younger version of Gandhi was in the zone of Vijay, and he performed that portion in a convincing way. As the older version of Gandhi, when he tries to slow down his dialogue rendering speed, it feels very odd. Similarly, when Jeevan becomes eccentric, the performance is not able to present a mad energy. Prashanth, Prabhu Deva, and Ajmal Ameer, as the batch members, are lost in the crowd with nothing much there for them to add. Similar was the case with female leads Sneha and Meenakshi Chaudhary. While Sneha at least had some lines and a character that had some say in the life of the hero, Meenakshi was totally forgettable in that kiss-dance-die character. Jayaram plays the role of the head of the SATS team, and Mohan is the antagonist with no aura.
The Greatest of All Time is an over-ambitious film that depends too much on the fan power of Vijay to sell something generic and exhausting. One can definitely say that the movie has no dull moments. But there are no genuinely exciting moments too, in this cat-and-mouse game that exploits the Chennai Super Kings sentiments to cover up its hollowness. Even for the die-hard fans of the actor, this will be like a watch, clap, and forget kind of entertainer.
The Greatest of All Time is an over-ambitious film that depends too much on the fan power of Vijay to sell something generic and exhausting.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
