Kaappaan is what you’d ostensibly get if you fed the ‘necessary ingredients’ of a commercially successful film into a computer, and it spat out a script. The film feels cold, like a synthetic, lifeless product manipulatively designed to subscribe to a formula. Take the scene in which Joseph (Samuthirakani), the director of the Special Protection Group, and wife share their love story. The scene is calculated as a warm moment, warmth that you know will later be utilised to draw your empathy—something like the Madhavan-Soha Ali Khan relationship in Rang De Basanti. However, the story Joseph and wife tell us of they got together, is astonishingly emotionless. It’s like the computer scanned through hundreds of old Tamil films, and regurgitated what had often passed for a romantic proposal. That would also likely explain the existence of the ‘bar song’ in this film—the sort in which skimpily clad women dance to entertain drunken men, while the noble hero is in pursuit of the villain. The writers of this film are not beyond hinting at an escapist duet too, at a horrible, horrible time in the story, but thankfully, stop with a romantic scene. Instead, you get that song at the end of the film—a happily ever after—when Kathir (Suriya) and Anjali (Sayyeshaa) engage themselves in some sort of ritualistic dance in icy locales. By then, they are the only people smiling.

Even the romance between Kathir and Anjali is established under strange—disturbingly strange—circumstances. Like in Saaho, the heroine here gets drunk on a mission. Kathir, the responsible man that he is, escorts her to her hotel room. She suddenly picks up a knife because the computer responsible for this script said so. He tries to calm her down, but somehow in the process, and nobody will truly know how, her clothes end up getting torn. She passes out and wakes up confused and concerned about the night before. Somewhere around this time, Joseph, Kathir’s friend, offers him a nugget of sagely advice: “Ponnunga seiyaadha nu sonna, sei nu artham.” The computer has probably not watched Nerkonda Paarvai yet. (continued in below link)

For the remainder of this review (and there’s a lot more left, I assure you), please visit https://www.cinemaexpress.com/reviews/tamil/2019/sep/20/kaappaan-movie-review-suriya–kv-anand-arya-mohanlal–sayyeshaa-an-overlong-film-full-of-bloat-and-d-14414.html