Agilan movie review

After Duraisingam established that “Indians are the Kings of the Indian Ocean” at the end of Singam 2, we've now got Agilan, who claims to be the one true king.

Whenever the film’s title is also the name of his character, it either ends up as a resounding hit or a colossal dud. Despite Ravi carrying the film on his able shoulders all by himself, Agilan goes nowhere and is as futile as an anchored ship. Despite his enemy lurking nearby in a different boat, given there’s no cover to take in the open ocean, Agilan still goes on with his operation. Imagine boarding the wrong flight to a different country because the airline decides to name their carrier in their own language. In one scene, Agilan goes to the middle of the ocean with a small motorboat that miraculously changes into a boat with extra props the very next scene. Agilan’s got a flashback that involves the death of innocent lives because, spoiler alert: his father gets conned.

N Kalyanakrishnan introduces us to the murky underworld of the Chennai port. While he does a meticulous job in setting up the milieu, the mark is missed ...

The film takes the first hour of the film to explain its labyrinthine milieu to us, which on paper, is not really a bad thing as not many of us in the audience are hardly familiar with the nuances of container mafia and the proportionality between sea traffic and inflation. A romance is established (with a minute-long lover’s repartee that seems out of place in the film), but never really explored with any form of depth. [Jayam Ravi](https://www.filmcompanion.in/topic/jayam-ravi) is slap-bang in the middle of a battle in the deep sea. Apart from a few sleek action set pieces (in one such scene, the makers have rollicking fun with the idea of mannequins to smuggle a high-profile data hacker), and Jayam Ravi’s sincere act, the film leaves us no real meat to chew on. The last time we saw him in the middle of a charged oceanic battle was in [Ponniyin Selvan](https://www.filmcompanion.in/reviews/tamil-review/ponniyin-selvan-movie-review-mani-ratnam-ponniyin-selvan-1-review-a-gorgeous-time-machine-that-forces-you-to-leave-the-books-at-home), warding off the Pandyas in a spectacularly choreographed sequence. Described by his boss Paranthaman (played by Tamil cinema’s stock villain Hareesh Peradi) as a “cunning dog”, we see Agilan smuggle drugs in freight containers as the star is introduced.

Director Kalyan Krishnan worked on the boxing scene in his earlier film with Jayam Ravi, Bhooloham. The director was appreciated for his detailing in the ...

The film is technically neat with good camera work by Vivek and fine editing. Chirag Jani is the next actor in line who makes an impact, and the rest of the cast including Priya Bhavani Shankar fit the bill. But does the film work on the whole?

Story: A ruffian, who works under an influential person at a sea port, strikes an illegal deal with an ambitious entrepreneur, leaving his boss furious.

Hareesh Peradi is apt in his role, but reminds us of a few characters he has essayed in the past. Despite the protagonist having a valid reason for being ambitious and thinking out-of-the box, we aren't able to relate completely with his emotions. However, Agilan has some other plans and he attempts to execute it with the help of Madhavi (Priya Bhavani Shankar), a cop and his lady love. Kalyana Krishnan succeeds in establishing convincing characters and setting up a story against a less explored backdrop. Self-obsessed and ambitious by nature, the former strikes a deal with Kapoor (Tarun Arora), an entrepreneur who earns crores through illegal means. Story: A ruffian, who works under an influential person at a sea port, strikes an illegal deal with an ambitious entrepreneur, leaving his boss furious.

Jayam Ravis Agilan collectes 2 crores till now at the box office on its first day. It is expected to collect till 3 crores by the end of its first day.

Another Twitter post said, "The first half of Agilan was crazy. The second half was a bit longer. The trailer launch of the film was held in Chennai recently. The first half was good. In this film, Jayam Ravi plays the role of a Gangster and Priya Bhavani Shankar is playing the police officer. The film stars Jayam Ravi as a Boxer.

Agilan is a action drama written and directed by N Kalyanakrishnan. The movie stars Jayam Ravi, Priya Bhavani Shankar, Tanya Ravichandran, Chirag Jani, ...

The first half of Agilan does a really good job of establishing the criminal nexus around the port, and Agilan's rise to be the 'King of the Ocean'. A lack of a villain worthy enough for the protagonist to take down also hampers these portions. The second half is starkly hampered by trying to whitewash its protagonist by giving him a tragic backdrop and bringing out the hidden 'Samaritan' agenda in him. In case of commercial potboilers like these that's headed by a popular and much-liked star, they refuse to maintain the grey status to its protagonist (films like Mankatha are rare examples). Agilan is so astute and farsighted that he even plants his love, Madhavi (Priya Bhavani Shankar), in the police department to keep him out of trouble. Agilan (Jayam Ravi), the protagonist, works as a crane operator there, but it is his side hustle that has earned him a lot of notorious attention.

Everybody growls in this film, and there are more villains than one can count, performing to deafening soundtracks. What's missing is a story.

The director makes a half-hearted attempt to rectify it later in the story, but it is far from enough. At the end of it, Agilan delivers (growls) a haphazard lecture on shipping economics to justify his smuggling. Apart from them, a star of Lal’s calibre is criminally wasted. One can accept why the director chose Jayam Ravi to play the father’s role in the flashback. Actually, growling is the sole unifying theme of this movie, which can loosely be described as a story about a lot of smugglers working out of a harbour in Tamil Nadu and one eternally angry cop intent on stopping them. This is why we have an equal variety of shots of cargo containers being loaded and unloaded, as we do villains in this movie.

The introduction scene of the hero in the movie Agilan has him smuggling three containers with fake currency into a cargo ship.

The back and forth in the second half is so much that you just lose track of what the movie was trying to say. The poor level of conviction that was there in that movie is clearly there in Agilan, which makes it a tiring and unintentionally funny film. There is even a moment where Agilan gets shot by his enemies and is put in the ocean. Agilan, a crane operator in a harbor in Chennai, and one of the close aid of this dock boss, Paranthaman, is our central character. N Kalyanakrishnan’s Agilan invests so much in certain moments that you get a feeling that the director wants to convey something only he knows. The introduction scene of the hero in the movie Agilan has him smuggling three containers with fake currency into a cargo ship.

The unique setting of an harbour is a world less explored in Indian films, save for exceptions like Iyarkai.

Though Agilan is majorly shot in the harbour and the sea, the happenings hardly engage.Whenever a film chooses a less-explored backdrop, it looks to place us in the shoes of the protagonist and details their profession. Agilan is essentially a revenge drama with the traditional plot of a son avenging a parent’s death and fulfilling their last wish. Similarly, Agilan surrenders to the cops in an attempt to save his girlfriend, but the police were not after him in the first place. For a while, the unpredictable nature of Agilan keeps us interested, but this character alone—and an invested Ravi — can’t salvage the damage done by the incoherent writing. To fulfil the dream of a deceased parent. Agilan does pretty much the same but in a Chennai harbour.