On this auspicious day of Vijayadashami that has fallen in the Gregorian calendar date of 20th October 2026, I watched Jailer 2 at INOX, in Chennai Citi Center mall.
Jailer 2, is quite good and is a worthy, and possibly even an improved, successor to the first part. Rajni reprises his role as Tiger Muthuvel Pandian, but now he is now living in a different town, ostensibly to let his family get a fresh start after the way things ended in part 1. We then get to know that this move was not to get away from the gang stealing idols, but is actually a move to get closer to the head of the snake.
The first half is a total hoot and the actor playing Pazhakada Murthy – Namo Narayanan – was rocking. The dialogues were witty and he delivers them with natural ease. Hope he gets more such roles going forward. Yogi Babu also shows up, but honestly, I couldn’t figure out if he was the same character from part 1 or a totally new one in part 2. There were some oblique references, but the picturization was confusing.
Rajni rocks as usual and like in Part 1, he doesn’t have to directly fight. Instead, he simply shoots an obscene number of rounds from automated machine guns at point blank range. Or, he gets snipers for long shots and turncoats for close range killing.
Shiva Rajkumar gets more screentime this time around, but Mohanlal has been edited out (or even written out). But even worse is the fate of Jackie Shroff who has a don’t-blink-and-you-might-still-miss role. They’ve added Hrithik Roshan who shows up with some kickass lady warriors at the end.
S J Suryah is at his hamming best and Vidya Balan at her smoking best – I think she probably smoked more in the movie than speak dialogues. Mithun Chakraborty rounds up the list of retired big names who show up in Rajni movies off-late.
The movie sags at the start of the 2nd half and you can skip to the 2nd item song. Yes there are two, though the first one dispenses away with the glamour part of an item song and makes it possible to watch with family. Some 15-20 minutes could have easily been cut in the post-interval segment, to around 5 minutes with better writing. Maybe the Director was pressured into extracting the maximum from costly stars whose dates were available. And another 5 minutes could be saved simply by reducing all the slow-motion walking by most characters.
The crux of the 2nd half is the portion where SJS reveals the truth to Rajni’s family that he only killed his son. This was the main requirement and could have been arrived much sooner, instead of meandering about somewhere. And then, making Vidya Balan mouth off a long sermon on why Rajni had killed his son – this was from the era of B&W movies.
But these are more of nitpickings in an otherwise well packaged movie, that has not just indicated a possibility of Part 3, but has confirmed that there is.
Jailer 2 proves that Rajni still has the ability to pull off such movies at this age and it is not wrong to say “Thalaivar Nirandharam”!
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