GOAT Review: No Logic Here

Divya Nair recommends that non-Vijay fans save their money and wait for GOAT to drop on Netflix. At least you can fast forward and get to the climax faster.

It's no longer unusual to see an actor play double and sometimes triple roles in cinema.

The trend of lead actors successfully playing both father and son peaked in Tamil cinema with Kamal Haasan's Indian in 1996, and continued with Thalapathy Vijay's Mersal and Bigil.

In Greatest of All Time (yes, that's the name of the movie!), Vijay pushes the envelope by using CGI and deep fakes to create not one but three different avatars of himself across different ages. It is probably the first time that technology has been used to create and tribute the late actor Vijayakanth (played by Vijay in disguise).

Vijay's 68th movie is set in two timelines -- 2008 and 2024.

The elder Vijay plays Gandhi (a careful choice of screen name, considering his latest political ambitions), a Special Anti-Terrorism Squad (SATS) officer.

During a covert operation in Kenya, his team of four -- Nazeer (Jayaram), Sunil Thiagarajan (Prashanth), Kalyan Sundaram (Prabhu Deva), and Ajay Govindaraj (Ajmal Ameer) -- successfully retrieve uranium that was stolen and bomb the train carrying a dreadful terrorist Rajiv Menon (played by yesteryear romantic hero Mohan).

Back home in India, the SATS team is disguised as employees of a tourism firm which often raises suspicion among family members.

In one such attempt to balance his high-risk secretive work and family life, Gandhi takes his pregnant wife and five-year-old son Jeevan to Thailand while he's chasing an important mission. When a group of men chases Gandhi and his family, his wife goes into labour while his son is kidnapped and later succumbs to a road accident.

Distraught by the personal tragedy, Gandhi punishes himself by quitting the squad and taking up a job as an immigration officer.

Cut to 2024, at a training session in Moscow, Gandhi bumps into a young boy who resembles him.

When confronted, younger Vijay (with an equally bad hairdo, albeit with less grey spikes), confesses that he is indeed Gandhi's son Jeevan who was kidnapped but did not die in the accident. (And Gandhi believes him because Thailand and Moscow are like Mumbai and Pune. Also, by Indian film logic, only father and son can have the same face.)

Jeevan is quickly reunited with his family and his childhood crush Sreenidhi (Meenakshi Chaudhary, who instantly falls for this chicken head-inspired hair ambassador) in India.

But it's only the beginning of new troubles.

When Gandhi's ex-boss Nazeer is attacked and killed, Gandhi rejoins the squad (like it's his family start-up, no interviews, no training).

We are at the intermission stage, and by now, you've likely realised that logic and plot have long gone out of the window. The audience is now surviving on Vijay's old movie dialogues (most of them are poorly revisited). Either the writers weren't paid enough to write fresh dialogues or maybe Vijay fans needed something to whistle about.

For hardcore Thalapathy fans who may enjoy watching their hero have the last laugh, there are a few twists in the story, but nothing is earth-shattering.

One would expect a Vijay movie to have ample comedy sequences.

In GOAT, the humour is weak but may evoke some forced laughter, sometimes out of mere exhaustion because the run time of 182 minutes (you can easily finish two tubs of popcorn) is perhaps the longest after Nanban.

Right from the first scene where Vijay disguises himself as Captain aka Vijayakanth, to calling himself Gandhi, there are subtexts of political campaigning to the extent that Jeevan's character mocks Kamal Haasan's iconic scene and dialogue from the movie Guna.

It is admirable to have Gandhi as your screen name and remind us that he is the 'Father of the nation', but the makers should have been careful about casual dialogues like: 'Dei Gandhi', which intentional or not, I felt, is disrespectful to the original Father of the Nation.

GOAT is mostly a failed attempt at mimicry, disguise, and de-ageing.

The film's ambitious title does no justice to Venkat Prabhu's version of Thalapathy vs Thalapathy because there is nothing so great about the film, the story or the message.

Vijay, usually known for his dance and action sequences, fails to produce anything memorable in GOAT.

However, his inimitable style of dialogue delivery keeps you entertained throughout.

Oh, and I must mention, the older version of Vijay is more bearable than the younger one. Do watch out for teenage Jeevan as well.

As for the runtime, the movie is stretched like a worn-out chewing gum that couldn't find a dustbin.

To cast Mohan as the villain was a bad idea but the real mastermind (no guesses) is part immature, rest cringe, so you can't decide who is worse.

Unless you want to waste your money on overpriced popcorn at a multiplex, I would recommend that non-Vijay fans save their money and wait for the film to drop on Netflix instead. At least you can fast forward and get to the climax faster.