Shame on Vidya Balan for agreeing to be part of this sordid, slurpy homage to hectic, hero-worship. Jailer In 2023 was bad enough. But the sequel is even worse, if that is possible. The sorry sequel, christened cutely as Rajini Jailer 2, is a barrage of balderdash, random action sequences strung together with a plot that pleads and bleeds for coherence.
In the absence of any kind of editing equanimity, Jailer 2 feels like a mound of glorification stymied by a smooth brainlessness which seems to suggest a team of Rajini worshippers trying to cook a digestible broth, but failing miserably.
The film opens with the pre-interval villain(the fantastic Suraj Venjaramoodu) torturing two goons in a manhole.What is he doing? Why is he so angry? This character remains consistently committed to creating some sense of his character in a film where everyone is on his own trip. I use the male gender deliberately, as the women here are nothing but puppets…in homes, on dance floors, everywhere.
Vidya Balan, an actress who always brings something special to screen, is here reduced to blowing artificially into cigarettes and sharing a weirdly Electra Complex role with her screen daddy, Mithun Chakraborty, who attempts a more daring stunt than Rajinikanth: Mithun tries to match dance steps with Nora Fatehi from a wheelchair.
The rest of the time, Mithun, as well as the rest of the characters, are just there to make the hero feel good about himself. The insane rush to deify Rajinikanth gets infuriatingly excessive and pointless after a while.
Who cares how extravagant Rajinikanth’s stardom is, when all he has to show for himself is a string of oafish action sequences, one more outlandish than the other.
In one action outdoor sequence, a pregnant girl is brutalized by a goon, while Rajini Sir, our massy hero, takes his time to save her. While he does his slo-mo salvation, the girl screams and begs for help.
So what is more important here? To give the hero a chance to do what heroes are supposed to, or aim for maximum impact as the hero teases the camera?
Writer-director Nelson Dilipkumar wouldn’t know the answers. He is too busy doing a saturated visual hagiography to bother with trivial matters such as coherence. Large chunks of the narrative feel as garbled as Shakespeare in a slapstick.
When a character brings up Brutus and Julius Caesar, I got my only laugh in this mirthless, worthless excursion into high-strung heroics.
The comic portions , especially in the first forty-five minutes featuring a clueless character called Moorthy(Namo Narayana), are so poorly written, they smell of indolence. The climax is equally sticky, with family secrets in the hero Tiger Muthuvel Pandian’s life straining to provide a delayed emotional weight to a narrative that has long gone South.
To state that there are no redeeming qualities in this malfunctional expedition into nothingness, would be an understatement.
By the time Hrithik Roshan comes on screen, the audience is too tired of the lazy writing and trite execution to even yawn. Jailer 2 is imprisoned in its own inadequacies. The goons come and go at will. They seem to be having fun. Even Rajinikanth has some fun flirting with Vidya Balan while her brother Bodi (S J Suryah) glowers. Everyone in the film seems excited with the goings-on.
If only the audience shared even a shred of that excitement.
