Irumbu Thirai Review: A cyber-thriller that drags but delivers!

Irumbu Thirai is Vishal’s next after he appeared a detective on screen in Thupparivalan.

It has been a while since Vishal had appeared in movies and Irumbu Thirai seems to give him a good entry after a while.

The movie is all about data insecurity or how easy it is to be scammed by the data that is collected from us.

In fact the movie has a very strong message and it leaves us with lots of questions and an insecure feeling once we leave the theatre.

However, the screenplay is not up to the mark and lets down the movie a bit.

A lot of time has been taken to make us understand the nature of the characters – and there’s some family scenes and sentiments.

This takes up almost all of the first half. And the director (PS Mithran, debudant) decides to leave us in hype for the second half.

But this formula takes up most of our patience and we are not left in a comfortable mood to enjoy the essence of the thriller that comes in the second half.

Having said that, if you can sit through the usual tamil masala stuff, you can end up enjoying the rest of the thriller.

As I said earlier, the movie has a good message – a message that is needed for today’s times. But the director has failed to spend ample time on the message.

Just like any other typical tamil movie, the director has spent unnecessary time on sentiments and love.

Vishal plays Kathiravan, an army major, who has anger management issues. He gets angry with any kind of provoking stuff and cannot control his anger.

He sports a look and mannerism to aptly match that of an army major. Kudos.

He has a father (Delhi Ganesh) who casually borrows money and doesn’t care. You can even say he is addicted to taking loans.

And a majority of population that borrows from the banks have this quality of Kathiravan’s father – so it becomes a lot relatable.

Kathiravan doesn’t like this behaviour of his father and the family ends up having to get a loan for the wedding of Kathiravan’s sister.

He manages to get this loan using some fake documents. Once he gets the loan money in his bank account, the money disappears!

Here comes the white devil (played by Arjun) – the king of digital crimes. He just knows how to intelligently steal money using the data and he is good at it.

And thank God, he doesn’t have a flash back to justify WHY he does stuff. I personally appreciate the director for this :).

How Vishal finds the cyber thief and how he handles them forms the rest of the movie (I mean all of the second half).

Some of the muscular action by Vishal doesn’t seem to fit in the whole cyber mode.

Arjun’s screen time is a lot lesser than you would expect for a strong villain the screenplay portraits.

Some would feel that his character would have gained a bit more strength and power with more screen time.

But I personally feel that his crisp appearance made the character sharp and powerful – just as needed for the story.

Samantha appears as Rathi Devi, a psychologist and Kathiravan’s lady love.

To be very honest, the movie would be just fine and enjoyable without her role in the scenario.

Nevertheless, she pulled it off like a boss and complemented Vishal very pleasantly.

A racy screenplay is what Irumbu Thirai lacks. For a cyber-crime thriller like IT, a fast-paced screenplay would have made it an edge-of-the-seat thriller.

Having said that, the movie is definitely worth the watch for the information it offers.

It educates you a lot and takes a bold dig on big stuff like “Digital India”, in particular Aadhar card – which is quite impressive.

The movie also tells the world how banks are strict with common men while corporate biggies easily get away with TONS of money in the name of bank loan!

Yuvan’s music perfectly complements the movie’s genre.

Go watch Irumbu Thirai in theatre for what you will learn about sharing your information! The movie will in fact make you uncomfortable about the whole digital thing!

Here’s the trailer of Irumbu Thirai.