Lingaa

Rajnikanth movies are mass entertainers because of its nature that gives the spotlight on the hero for his style and attitude.  When those two factors are there in abundance, then the story part naturally becomes less of a concern. The three hour long Lingaa from director K S Ravikumar fails miserably in using the stardom of Rajnikanth. Punch lines and action sequences are the unique factors of a Rajni movie and you will hardly find any of that in this movie.

Lingaa aka Lingeswaran is a thief. A TV reporter Lakshmi, who apparently knows the history of Lingaa’s ancestors, comes to him in demand of a favor. There is a dam and a temple in a village named Solaiyur. The officials are conducting tests to check the strength of the Dam. The village head was warned by an engineer that only if the temple gets a revamp, the dam will have a good future. For that they need someone from the same blood of King Lingeswaran who built the dam and our central protagonist thief Lingaa is that lucky soul. History of the king Lingaa and the purpose of the new Lingaa’s arrival at the village is what K S Ravikumar telling us.

The story part has nothing new or interesting to its credit and everything we wanted to see was on Rajni’s shoulder or I should say K S Ravikumar’s presentation of Rajni as Lingaa. The intro song will remind us of Shankar’s way of filming songs and throughout the movie you can sense KSR adapting too much of Shankar style, especially in the songs part. The present day Lingaa and his friends are supposed to be the ones who should carry the burden of humor and they haven’t done a great job as the writing doesn’t have much for them. The film then goes into this lengthy, preachy, cheesy episode of heroism that focuses on the King Lingaa. With very peripheral conflicts and easily predictable narration the film becomes quite dull. When the super star did a summersault to get into the bike for that climax fight, I thought KSR finally has something for the audience, but to my disappointment he made a mess of it with unbearable exaggerations.

Rajnikanth has that grace when he delivers certain dialogs but the lack of energy is clearly visible at many points. Anushka’s body gets more focus than expressions. Sonakshi Sinha gets to do another version an over dramatic character (different from the Prabhu Deva movies she do). Jagatpati Babu, G Vishwanath, Santhanam, Radha Ravi, Brahmanandam and many others are there in the big star cast who all did what the director demanded.

As a maker K S Ravikumar couldn’t achieve anything interesting with his writing. The script is over written and the director has made a film which still follows the same old conventions. Cinematography was nice. The art direction was good. The visual effects were poor. The edits are okay and I wasn’t that impressed by the work of A R Rahman. Song placing was extremely poor. There aren’t any catchy punch dialogs to entertain you.

Overall Lingaa disappointed me. I wasn’t expecting anything unlike a Rajnikanth movie, but the lack of style and punch dialogues seriously makes the movie dull and with a run time of 175 minutes, that dullness is serious problem. The rating is 2/5 for Thalaivar’s Lingaa.