The Tamil critic says debutant director Jason Sanjay leaned on his grandfather S.A. Chandrasekhar's four-decade-old formula instead of the fresh cinema he reportedly studied abroad.
Jason Sanjay picked a story about a crumbling library, a dead father's debt and a locker worth a thousand crore for his directorial debut. Critic Blue Sattai Maran thinks he picked wrong.
In his review of Sigma, Maran doesn't hold back. He says Jason Sanjay, grandson of veteran director S.A. Chandrasekhar, had the chance to break away from his family's old-school template and chose not to. Word had gone around that the young director spent time abroad studying cinema before coming home to make his first film. Maran's verdict: whatever he picked up overseas didn't make it to the screen. He describes the result as the same stale dough kneaded all over again, a line that's already doing the rounds on Tamil film Twitter.
The Sigma story itself isn't complicated. A villainous gang moves to seize a dilapidated library over a debt the hero's late father had taken on. The hero, fighting to save the place, stumbles onto the key to a locker holding a vault worth a thousand crore. Whether he uses that money to clear the library's debt is more or less the entire plot. Maran's complaint isn't the premise so much as the execution, which he calls flat, with neither the story nor the screenplay generating any real pull.
What stings most in the review is the comparison Maran draws to Jason Sanjay's own family history. Forty years ago, S.A. Chandrasekhar directed Sattam Oru Iruttarai, about a hero who punishes criminals by exploiting the very loopholes in the law that let them escape in the first place. Maran argues Sigma is built on the same bones, just repackaged, and that there's nothing in the new film that suggests the grandson was aiming for anything beyond his grandfather's playbook.
He does throw the film a bone on craft. The chases work, he says, and the making has polish. But he's quick to note that credit for that belongs to the stunt choreographer and the cinematographer, not the director. A film earns its director praise only when the idea underneath holds up, and Maran's point is that Sigma's idea simply doesn't.
His closing ask is straightforward: more homework and a tighter screenplay the next time around, because a debut built on a borrowed premise and an unoriginal script, however smooth the action looks, was never going to travel far on nostalgia alone. Whether Jason Sanjay's next outing takes that note is the only thing that will actually settle this argument. For now, Sigma's fate at the ticket counter, and whether other reviewers line up behind Maran's reading, is what the next few days will decide.
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