H Vinoth’s Jana Nayagan, more importantly Vijay’s Jana Nayagan, or even more accurately Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay’s Jana Nayagan, finally sees the light of day. An obvious propaganda vehicle, Vijay’s cinematic swansong was slated to release in January this year. But the film faced release troubles when the censor certificate was withheld without reason, forcing the makers to approach the courts. The court and censor battle stretched long enough that several things came to pass. The film mysteriously leaked online. Tamil Nadu then had its state elections in April, in which Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam emerged as the biggest party, leading to him taking oath as the state’s Chief Minister on 10 May. It was such an eventful, unprecedented couple of months that the film always had an uphill task, a mere underscoring of the occasion.
Weaving politics and propaganda are not alien to Vijay. With AR Murugadoss he made Sarkar (2018), a film with enough contemporary political iconography of Tamil Nadu that it was the actor’s celluloid announcement to enter the electoral arena. Jana Nayagan is supposed to be a double whammy—a celebration of a star ending a cinematic career at its zenith as well as a proxy to his party’s ideological framework. At least that’s the expectation. But the film concerns itself with only the latter.
Let’s be real, nobody is looking for a masterpiece here. But we are looking for an intriguing plot, a couple of swoon-worthy action set pieces, and one final moment for Tamil cinema’s last star actor to shine. Vinoth doesn’t even manage one of these. He borrows characters and the general blueprint from Anil Ravipudi’s Bhagavanth Kesari (2023)—with Mamitha Baiju as Viji reprising Sreeleela’s role—and then builds the film around Vijay’s party and political ambitions, the threat of communal forces entering Tamil Nadu, his promise to make the state safer for women, and to clean up the corruption. All this in a slipshod screenplay that jumps from one issue to the next.
It’s not only the issues—the film leaps through time too. We begin in 2026 in a village that is boycotting the elections. A police officer begins to narrate the story of a courageous hero to convince the people to go vote. It moves to a Madurai prison in 2013 and then leaps ahead a decade or so to Chennai. For a fight sequence, it travels back to an undeclared time. There's a post-intermission flashback set in 2005, which tells us that Thalapathy Vetri Kondan (yes, that’s his name, it abbreviates to TVK) was a notorious police officer in the mid-2000s. How is he able to lead a quiet life almost two decades down the line? We don’t know.
Prakash Raj plays an amalgam of all of Vijay’s political enemies. Bobby Deol is a stick figure of a cartoon villain, without real motivation other than some murky desire to bathe Tamil Nadu in the blood of religious intolerance. There is very little actual politics in Jana Nayagan. For a film seemingly about safeguarding democracy, all Vijay does is preach violence.
The film entirely forgets that it began with a village boycotting elections and becomes about a gangster-politician-police nexus. There is irresponsible rabble-rousing about Hindu-Muslim riots and speechifying about women’s strength without offering any agency to them. In between chasing villains, Vijay barges into a school annual day function to teach kids about ‘bad touch’. Is this a parody of Vijay films of yore? Only Vinoth can tell.
Just consider the amount of thought that’s gone into this film. Viji’s panic attacks when she gets scared are called “fear phobia”. Fear. Phobia. Whatever his faults as an actor or as a leader, a big star like Vijay deserved a half-decent farewell. Jana Nayagan dilutes the celebratory highs of his latter-day career: Atlee’s effective potpourri of commercial film beats, Lokesh Kanagaraj injecting life into the idea of Vijay as serious action hero. H. Vinoth is not a tastemaker like either of them. But he needn’t have done the man so dirty in his final film.
‘Jana Nayagan’ is in theatres.
Aditya Shrikrishna is a Chennai-based critic.