Einstein’s theory of relativity explains time dilation—when time seems to stretch differently depending on your perspective. After catching an early-morning show of Suriya’s Kanguva, I felt like I had experienced it for real! Although the movie was 152 minutes long, it felt like I had spent a solid seven hours in that theatre. By the end, I stumbled out, yawning as if I had run a marathon.
The film kicks off with bounty hunter Francis and his antics as he encounters a strange boy during one of his missions. Right from this first part, hints of the mediocrity to come start to show. Yogi Babu’s usual antics, Suriya’s unusual ones, and Disha Patani’s awkward Tamil set the tone for this section.
The film then shifts into a period fantasy, with Suriya playing Kanguva, a tribal chieftain who leads the fight against traitors within his tribe and attackers from rival tribes.
Here, Suriya returns to his usual form, delivering a solid performance. However, the film struggles to build any emotional connection with the audience, leaving scenes meant to convey Kanguva’s anger, pain, and happiness falling flat and unimpactful. The dialogues don’t help, coming off as amateurish at best.
If there’s anything more amateurish than the dialogue, it’s the CGI. In a supposedly tense scene where Kanguva battles a crocodile, the effects were so poor that the theatre erupted in laughter—the crocodile looked about as realistic as a rubber bath toy.
Suriya has delivered films like Ezham Arivu, where he plays a protagonist in the present with ties to a past incarnation. Kanguva follows a similar storyline, but unlike Ezham Arivu, which effectively connected the two characters, Kanguva feels as if the filmmaker Siva assumes the audience will accept the plot without question.
Bobby Deol steps in as the antagonist, a rival tribe leader, but aside from a few dramatic screams, slow-mo walks, and poorly synced dialogue, he doesn’t bring much else to the table.
The film is packed with action sequences, but editor Nishadh Yusuf, known for his impressive work in Thallumala, delivers a lacklustre result here, leaving the action scenes largely unimpactful. While there was ample opportunity for creative cinematography and on the music side, Kanguva falls short in these areas, too. That said, the art and colour grading departments did manage to deliver decently.
Overall, the film is a massive letdown. Reports suggest a budget between Rs 300 and Rs 350 crore, but once again, it proves that all the money in the world can’t compensate for a weak script, and there’s only so much the actors can do without strong storytelling. It was frustrating just to get through the first part, only for the film to end with the looming threat of a sequel!
Title: Kanguva (Tamil)
Director: Siva
Cast: Suriya, Bobby Deol, Disha Patani
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 | ★✦☆☆☆
