Jana Nayagan review: Vijay deserved a better goodbye than this bloated spectacle

33 years. 69 films. One man. One last time.Crores of people are flocking to theatres across the globe to watch Jana Nayagan and bid farewell to the man who entertained them for over three decades. Every cheer, every whistle and every celebration is for one person. Thalapathy Vijay. No, strike that. It's Chief Minister Vijay now. Is Jana Nayagan an emotional goodbye to an actor or a rousing welcome to the Chief Minister? Neither, as it turns out — it's mostly just a film that can't decide what it wants to be.Thalapathy Vetri Kondan (Vijay) is serving jailterm, but he is the most obedient prisoner ever. Srikanth (Gautham Menon), an honest jailer, who is the father of Viji (Mamitha Baiju) shares great camaraderie with Thalapathy (his arm tattoo earlier said TVK — until the censors got to it). Srikanth meets with an accident and on his deathbed, he entrusts Thalapathy with Viji, pushing him to make her join the army. He asks him to raise her up as a strong, independent woman, who doesn't need to be saved.Meanwhile, there's trouble brewing on a massive level. Enter John Himmler (Bobby Deol), a corporate villain, who's using animatronics to cause chaos in the country. But, he has already crossed paths with Thalapathy Vetri Kondan. When Viji gets involved in the chaos, Thalapathy's protective mode gets triggered and his past catches up with the antagonist for a massive showdown. Director H Vinoth's Jana Nayagan, heavily inspired from Bhagavanth Kesari, wants to be a tribute to Thalapathy Vijay and a political statement in the same breath, and the seams show throughout. Even with the censor board muting most of the direct Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) references and the sharper party call-outs softened, what's left on screen is still a film more interested in championing Vijay as a considerate politician and an alternate option that Tamil Nadu badly needed, rather than in telling a story. The self-mythologising even reaches back a generation: in one scene, Vijay walks past a portrait of MGR, and the legendary actor-politician addresses him as "Thangame Thalapathy" and hands over his whip — baton passed, quite literally, in case the point wasn't already made loudly enough. It's loud and aggressive, but rarely earns either. If there's one stretch where Jana Nayagan actually delivers, it's the interval block — by far the film's high point, and one of the few sequences where the scale, the drama and Vijay's presence come together the way the film clearly wants them to throughout. A handful of the template elevation scenes work too, landing the whistle-podu moment they're built for. But that's about where the good parts end. H Vinoth's changes to the original, especially the new subplots layered on top of Bhagavanth Kesari, feel dated rather than fresh — the kind of narrative padding that a film this aware of its own political messaging can't really afford. The core emotional beats carried over from the original, particularly the track built around Viji, are meant to be the emotional core, and include a good touch-bad touch sequence aimed at driving the film's child-safety message home. But they do not always land. Instead, the emotions appear more gestured at than earned.The antagonist's arc doesn't help either. Bobby Deol's villain track is, frankly, absurd — the animatronics angle and the detour to Africa and Pakistan take the film and the story everywhere. By the time the second half begins, it's hard to take the character seriously at all. The VFX work doing the heavy lifting for that track is shaky throughout, which only makes the absurdity harder to ignore.Somewhere around the interval, the film loses the plot entirely and starts throwing everything it can think of at the screen — geopolitical unrest abroad, cross-border terror threats at home, aerial combat, machines squaring off against machines and against people. It's meant to feel epic; instead it tips the film over into a self-indulgent drama that cares only about one man. A prolonged action sequence built entirely around Operation MM, led by Bobby Deol's character — closer to twenty minutes — ends up looking like AI-generated footage stretched to fill a runtime. Ironically, it's a quieter flashback that works best — the one where Vijay plays Thalapathy Vetri Kondan as a principled cop, long before the film decides bigger is better. There was genuine emotion there, even if only for a brief time.Mamitha Baiju is the one performer who comes out of this looking better than the film deserves, continuing to prove she can hold her own in roles with actual agency. Pooja Hegde is stuck with a thin, decorative part. Bobby Deol has the presence for a menacing villain but is let down badly by the writing and the VFX around him.Raichel Rebecca's episode is one of the few genuinely affecting stretches in the film, though it overstays its welcome and could have made its point in less time; the rest of the supporting cast — Gautham Menon, Prakash Raj, Revathi, Priyamani, Narain, Nasser — are there mostly to fill out the frame.At this point, it's Vijay and Anirudh Ravichander who are holding Jana Nayagan together. Vijay looks entirely at ease switching registers — settling into the quieter emotional beats as easily as he channels the rage the mass moments demand, without either ever feeling forced. Sathyan Sooryan's cinematography keeps the film looking handsome even when the writing isn't earning it, and Ravana Mavanda still lands as a genuine high on the big screen. But Pradeep Ragav's editing loses its grip in patches — a few scenes and emotional beats sit next to each other without transitions that earn them — and the climax stretches on well past the point of patience, undoing whatever goodwill the interval block had built up.Even with the censor board's edits softening the TVK branding, Jana Nayagan doesn't feel like a film that was reined in — it feels like a film whose problems were never really about the politics in the first place. Strip away the manifesto, and what's left is a sloppily assembled entertainer held up almost entirely by its lead and its music.For the fans, the farewell will still register even with the muted references and all. For everyone else walking in for the movie alone, the campaign speech runs longer than the film does.- EndsPublished On: Jul 23, 2026 11:04 IST