Eeswaran, On Disney+ Hotstar With Silambarasan, Is A Generic Film That Has Nothing New To Offer

Director: Suseenthiran
Cast: Silambarasan, Bharathiraja, Nidhhi Agerwal, Nanditha Swetha

Eeswaran is set in a village in Dindigul where Periyasamy (Bharathiraja) is a patriarch. A tragedy strikes him at a very young age and over time his children move to Chennai. They're all all fighting each other due to money issues. What brings Periyasamy's four children back to their village is the pandemic. So, you could call Eeswaran a historically important film, in a way. It's the first Tamil masala film that has the pandemic as a part of the plot. But that doesn't mean that the rest of the film has anything new to offer. 

Eeswaran is like a lot of films that are made because a hero has available dates and the director writes a script as quickly as possible. The film has a few interesting little bits: Periyasamy's past, the part about a child with a hole in the heart or how Poongodi (Nidhhi Agerwal), the sister of Eeswaran ex-girlfriend, Vasuki (Nanditha Swetha), is now attracted to him. But neither Poongodi nor Vasuki have much to contribute to the film.

You know the worth of a masala movie by the weight of the villain, and in Eeswaran he's a random guy in jail who has some enmity with the family. Like everything else in the film, this angle is hardly developed and it isn't even interesting. You just have a person asking someone what their feud is about and we cut to the flashback.

In the recent Master and Sulthan, the heroes were vulnerable. In Master, for example, two kids died because of Vijay's negligence. In Sulthan, there's a stretch where the hero has to handle a tricky situation to protect the people he considers his family. But here, there's no vulnerability for the hero at all. So, there's no suspense. 

Simbu's introduction shot has him playing a cricket match where his team has to score seven runs in the last over. In the second half, Eeswaran is bitten by a cobra and the poison spreads through his body. At one point in the film, Eeswaran needs to help the girl with a hole in her heart get to the hospital. If you're biting your nails, anxious to know what would happen next in any of these scenarios, Eeswaran is the movie for you. For the rest of us, it's as generic as they come.