‘Maanaadu’ movie review: Simbu and SJ Suryah have a go at each other in this smartly-written film

Filmmaker Venkat Prabhu takes a mainstream Hollywood trope and converts it into a work of ‘masala’ cinema. The result? We get a thrilling film in ‘Maanaadu’

In Maanaadu, the first plot point arrives at the half-hour mark. This is what happens: amidst a sea of party cadres, a civilian takes the gun from his shoulder bag and pulls the trigger, aimed at the Chief Minister of the State. He kills the CM in a single shot from what appears to be a distance of at least 100 metres from the podium.

Let’s assume that the civilian is an unwilling participant and all of this is orchestrated with careful precision by a third party of superior force. Even if we were to go by that logic, the probability of killing the Chief Minister in the first shot is a one in a hundredth scenario, given that he is just a normal person with flesh and bone. In another film, this probability would have been a worrying factor and probably absurd too. But in Maanaadu, the absurdity of events is the fun; you derive pleasure from the hero Abdul Khaaliq’s (Silambarasan) frustration of being caught in a time-loop, where events go round and characters talk in circles. And the chewable bit for the audience is the lived experience of having sat through the sequences again and again; like a merry-go-round but one manned by someone who seems to know the machine in and out.