Nayyapudai (2016)

In the initial phase of his career, Vijay had to bank on his father, SA Chandrasekaran (SAC) to turn him into a hero. Now, it is the turn of the father to piggyback on his son's stardom. Every now and then, Vijay and people and things associated to him are brought up every now and then in the hope that these will get the audience whistling. When the film's other lead tells his name is Vijay Kumar, a kid asks, 'Oh! Namma Vijay a?' In one scene, SAC asks a gangster if he has seen Thuppakki and goes on to recreate a scene from the film to get information. And one character is called Sangeetha, after Vijay's wife, and this girl refers to SAC as 'uncle'. Then, there is also a dialogue where SAC's character boasts, "Captain, Thalapathy-kellaam training kuduthavan". The plot revolves around Velusamy (SAC), a 70-year-old ex-military man who becomes a sensation after a video of him beating up goons on a bus goes viral. But, Baby Anaconda (Naan Kadavul Rajendran), the gangster whose men he thrashed, tries to take his revenge by colluding with the assistant commissioner, Sathyamoorthy (MS Bhaskar) and targeting Vijay Kumar (Pa Vijay), the journalist who made Velusamy popular. Can this 'angry, old man' (as the tagline describes him) foil the plan? Nayyappudai makes it clear that it wants to be a masala movie, with an old man doing things that are usually done by a mass hero. But the problem is that the execution is so clumsy, with no sense of the filmmaking basics. The film feels like someone shot the scenes and then assembled them in a slapdash fashion. And there is uncertainty over every choice — should Naan Kadvaul Rajendran be treated as a comedian or as a real villain? Should MS Bhaskar be menacing or amusing? And for all its invocations of all things Vijay, SAC's character is mostly seen with a toothpick between his lips, a la Suriya in Anjaan! This confusion exists even with who the director is - is it M Jeevan, who is credited as the cinematographer and director when the film ends, or is it Vijaya Kiran, who is credited as executive director (whatever that means) during the title credits. As for the audience, there is only one decision to make: which is the bigger loss — the money spent on the ticket or the two hours spent watching the movie?