Thuppaki Munai Review: An average thriller that’s not as racy as it needs to be

After quite a while Vikram Prabhu is back on screen as an encounter specialist Birla Bose. He is so serious about his encounters and believes that every bullet in his gun has the name of the criminal written on it.

He, in a way, enjoys killing the bad guys. However he has a mom and a girlfriend (played by Hansika) who don’t like the nature of his job.

His mom thinks that he is a murderer. And they both leave him for the same reason.

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After successfully performing 32 encounters, Bose is assigned the job of killing a person called Azad (Shiva). He is believed to have raped and murdered a 15 year old girl (Manjal Nayagi).

Hence Bose travels to Rameswaram to complete this task. But as he moves on closely and is about to perform the encounter, things take a turn.

He suspects that Azad could have been falsely charged for the crime and hence holds on to find the truth.

Vikram truly fits in the role of a realistic and sincere encounter specialist. He has definitely done his homework for the role.

Hansika has very limited screen time. Her role is somewhat important to the story, yet the romantic part is totally unnecessary and is, for the most part, unromantic.

The need for a heroine in this story is a purely cinematic approach. MS Bhaskar plays the father of the rape victim girl and he has done his part pretty powerfully.

He emotes well and delivers dialogues in an effective manner. However at times, his dialogues get preachy and forced in a “bit too much” sense.

The movie does create sympathy for the core idea of rape and murder of a small girl. But it fails to connect with the audience.

Most part of the movie deals with cinematic stuff – like unwanted heroic sequences, unnecessary romance, forced preaching and the like.

In fact, all of the first half has nothing to do to empathize with or engage the audience.

The second half does pick up some pace but that too is lost in making too many cinematic switching – from one perspective to another.

Nevertheless, Thuppaki Munai can be a decent watch if you are not too keen on a racy thriller. 

In fact for the crisp run time, the screenplay could have been a lot racier. Unfortunately, the movie moves in a very slow pace, being diluted along the way with so many “elements” to finally deliver a socially responsible message.

At places, you can also see the director go a bit overboard in conveying the dark side associated with such crimes that target women/girl children.

The BGM sounds jarring and is somewhat unpleasant. We can see some touches of Mani Ratnam as the director Selvaraj is himself a former associate of the legend.