Beast

Although I was always on the fence about how good a director Nelson Dilipkumar was, some endearing elements of his earlier ventures like "Kolamaavu Kokila (2018)" and "Doctor (2021)" included his ability to churn out humour in the most unexpected of circumstances as well as his attention to detail when it came to his character sketches. His latest release "Beast", however, falters on both fronts while also failing to provide adequate mass elevation scenes and fan service to even render it appreciable for Vijay aficionados.

As the teasers and trailer mostly gave away, Vijay stars as "Veera Raghavan", a former intelligence operator who gets stuck in a mall Die Hard style while the establishment is run over by a gang of armed terrorists. How he uses his fists and wits to battle his way out of the seemingly intractable crisis and rescue the civilians trapped inside forms the rest of this cliched plotline. While one can forgive the predictability in the storyline, the superficial nature of the supporting cast makes the entire movie-watching experience go for a toss, with the antagonists especially reduced to mere caricatures, with no depth or character arcs to speak of.

And the comedy that Nelson has made his hallmark fails to take off. While some one-liners from veteran VTV Ganesh manage to evoke some laughs, the normally dependable Yogi Babu and Redin Kingsley are given precious little creative dialogues to work with. The female protagonists-Pooja Hegde and Aparna Das, as with all recent Vijay movies, reduce to mere also-there tropes. It was particularly painful to watch Shine Tom Chacko, a character actor who won the admiration of millions of fans across the nation with his powerful performances in "Kurup (2021)" and "Bheeshma Parvam (2022)" reduced to such a lame-duck side role.

Stunt sequences in superstar movies have always bordered on the implausible to the downright impossible but where Beast falters is in trying to also add quirkiness, the believability factor is reduced to nought as a whole while raising the cringe factor to full. With clear 'inspiration' taken from "Money Heist", at no point does any of the action choreography manage to wow you or catch you by surprise, despite having a superstar of Vijay's natural charisma and dexterity at their disposal.

Vijay's calculus in trying to broaden his appeal by imbibing Nelson's characteristic wit and humour into his superstar image with "Beast" was, unfortunately, undone by unimaginative, derivative stunt sequences as well as a string of poorly written, underdeveloped supporting characters. Nelson clearly had to sacrifice his natural storytelling style to accommodate the 'superstar' persona of his lead actor and in forcibly making Vijay dominate every sequence, the narrative strength and emotional impact of the storyline clearly suffered.

A disastrous, over-the-top, cringe-pro-max ultra-final act will render you speechless (in a bad way) and run screaming out of the theatre. Ultimately, we experienced the best parts of "Beast" even before the film's theatre release-its two superb songs "Arabic Kuthu" and "Jolly O Gymkhana" and its kickass BGM. This movie is one dumpster fire you would want to avoid at all costs. Not recommended!

A cliched, Vijay version of Die Hard with some inspiration from Money Heist set in a nonsensical comical world where the protagonist and everything he does, doesn't fit into. It seems that the director has his way of creating his world of characters who can be smart and dumb at the same time. But being a Vijay movie, the star only has a few ways that could be acceptable to his fans. On top of that action scenes which are just enough to take you out of the immersion and feel weird and the placement of songs like it was 15 years ago make it hard all around for this movie. There is a lot of stuff in the movie that could have just worked if they tweaked it a little bit. It's still a one time watch for fans of these types of action films.

Thalapathty anirudh bgm super .story screenplay very very average.it's looks like gurkha movie.it's better than gurkha movie but this is thalapathy movie.nelsons previous films are really good.but this time very big disappoinment.

Really disappointed, everything seems to be okay but the problem is, Why did Vijay choose this movie.

Vijay gotta be more serious about selecting scripts, how can such a big star choose an unrealistic film.

Despite good comedy elements, this film has nothing to talk about.

I'm ashamed, this film was suppose to represent Tamil cinema!!!

As anticipated, Nelson succumbs to the star tropes of Thalapathy Vijay, failing to come up with a script that'd even keep viewers mildly interested. In fact, the opening act is the only decent stretch in the entire film. Everything from PTSD therapy to terrorism to women's looks is shamed to the core. The mass elevations are zilch, and Veeraraghavan's awkward stiffness doesn't work here at all. It's like Nelson literally planted Vijay in a Doctor-like universe where everything including a hostage situation is treated too lightly, terrorists act like caricatures, there's a buffoon for a home minister, and the supposed humour doesn't function one bit. The writing lazily imagines Vijay shooting and stabbing his way through dozens of baddies for nearly three hours, with an uber-cute Pooja Hedge hot on his trail for no legitimate reason whatsoever. Anirudh delivers on the musical front, but in a film where nothing really sticks, it'll hardly be remembered. Nelson needs to rework his formula that worked pretty well in his first two films - the secret sauce (dark comedy + hilarious supporting acts) is terribly lacking in Beast. And oh, that dreadful climactic stretch.. nail in the coffin!