Spoilers ahead…
When there is so much newness, you want to see it taken all the way. You don’t want to see it in a compromised form.
“A terrific premise. A big heart. But too long and, after a point, too one-note – we seem to be seeing variations on the same themes and jokes.” I said this about Madonne Ashwin’s first film, Mandela, and I have the same comments to make about this director’s second film, Maaveeran, which is a kind-of sequel to Mandela. Here, too, a man is oppressed. In Mandela, the protagonist was literally from an oppressed community. Here, Sathya (played by Sivakarthikeyan), is a cowardly lower-middle-class man who is oppressed by the System and its politicians. And in both films, the way out from this oppression is through the protagonist’s very identity. In Mandela, it was a voter ID card. Here, it is through Sathya’s identity as a cartoon-panel storywriter, who creates a serialised Kanni Theevu-like comic strip for a Tamil newspaper. The maaveeran – “brave warrior” – of the comic strip is Sathya’s id, his Tyler Durden. It’s an extension of his identity, representing the rage that’s inside him but just won’t come outside.
You can read the rest of the review here:
https://www.galatta.com/tamil/movie/review/maaveeran/
And you can watch the trailer / video review here:
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