Simbu and Gautham Menon are superb in this very ordinary gangster drama
In fact, it doesn’t even claim to belong to the gangster genre.
Instead, we get a nice procedural drama that is both a blessing and a curse. More about that later.
And Gautham Menon anyway isn’t interested in telling the story of a gangster; he seems content with the journey itself.
He seems interested in capturing the life of Muthu in real time.
By doing so, Gautham creates a mood piece with space and leisure
That makes it hard to tell whether I enjoyed it to its entirety or if something felt lost in translation.
But what I can confidently say is that the world VTK tries to construct in the first half is exquisite — both in terms of writing and direction.
Gautham usually has this urgency to get into the protagonist’s head and ‘narrate’ his story, but that has been course-corrected.
He has been using voice-over as a device to further the narrative.