Siddharth Archives – CULTURE MIX

Review: ‘3BHK,’ starring Siddharth, R. Sarathkumar, Devayani, Meetha Raghunath, Yogi Babu and Chaithra J. Achar

July 13, 2025

by Carla Hay

Devayani, Meetha Raghunath, R. Sarathkumar and Siddharth in “3BHK” (Photo courtesy of Shanthi Talkies)

Directed by Sri Ganesh

Tamil with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place from 2006 to 2025 in Chennai, India, the dramatic film “3BHK” (based on the short story “3BHK Veedu”) features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: A family experiences various setbacks and challenges in the family’s dream to own a home.

Culture Audience: “3BHK” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, the short story on which the movie is based, and heartfelt dramas about family struggles.

Meetha Raghunath, Devayani, Siddharth and R. Sarathkumar in “3BHK” (Photo courtesy of Shanthi Talkies)

“3BHK” can get a bit repetitive and long-winded in this drama about a family aspiring to own a home. It’s still a very good movie about the ups and downs of family love during many obstacles and difficulties. Viewers shouldn’t expect too many surprises, but this film is elevated by appealing performances from the principal cast members.

Written and directed by Sri Ganesh, “3BHK” is based on Aravindh Sachidanandam’s 2023 short story “3BHK Veedu.” The movie (which is intermittently narrated by actor Karthi) takes place from 2006 to 2025, in Chennai, India, where “3BHK” was filmed on location. The story is about two parents, their son, and their daughter, but the movie is told mainly from the perspective of the son, who has a fluctuating relationship with his father.

“3BHK” (which is told in chronological order) begins in 2006, when the family moves into a cramped apartment. An accountant named Vasudevan (played by R. Sarathkumar) and his homemaker wife Shanthi (played by Devayani) are parents to two teenagers: son Prabhu (played by Siddharth) and daughter Aarthi (played by Meetha Raghunath), who is about two years younger than Prabhu. Prabhu, who is about 17 years old in the beginning of the movie, remarks to his father that each new home they move into is getting smaller.

Vasudevan responds to Prabhu’s remark by saying that they have to move into a smaller home because the rent keeps increasing. Vasudevan then lectures Pradhu to do better in the private school where Vasudevan is paying for Pradhu’s tuition. Pradhu snaps back that Vasudevan still doesn’t have enough money to buy a house. This comment cuts deep for Vasudevan, who feels that he is failing in his goal to own a home for himself and his family.

This goal of home ownership and the family’s finances become the sources of emotional warfare that sometimes happens between Prabhu and Vasudevan. Prabhu has been failing in some of his classes (such as mathematics and computer science) at school, which has given Prabhu one last chance to improve his grades. And when Vasudevan finds out, he sternly tells Prabhu that he will disown Prabhu if Prabhu fails any of his classes and doesn’t graduate.

In contrast to Prabhu, Aarthi excels in academics and is considered the “perfect child” in this family. Aarthi is the one who comes up with an idea that the family should build their first house. But that idea is scrapped when they find out that the budget to build this house will be at least ₹15 lakhs, and Vasudevan has only ₹7.5 lakhs in savings. Shanthi offers to sell her jewelry, which would get them an additional ₹3.5 lakhs, which still wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost.

Over the next several years, as Prabhu and Arthi become adults, Prabhu struggles to find the right career for himself, while Arthi marries into a wealthy family and becomes a mother to a daughter. Prabhu has a high school sweetheart named Aishwarya, also known as Aishu (played by Chaithra J. Achar), who is in and out of his life. Through it all, the dream of home ownership remains constant. Yogi Babu has a small role as a real-estate broker named Babu.

One of the recurring themes in “3BHK” is that this home ownership goal is used as an embodiment of not only the family’s status in society but also how the family members feel about themselves. Vasudevan and Prabhu clash with each other many times in the movie. And the underlying reason is because they are both afraid of being disappointments.

If “3BHK” has any limitations, it’s in how the movie makes Shanthi a very underdeveloped character. Shanthi plays a generically supportive wife and mother, who tends to fade into the background when the conflicts between Vasudevan and Prabhu are at the forefront of the story. This 141-minute movie could have also shortened all the lengthy sequences of Prabhu getting rejected for various jobs.

Despite these flaws, “3BHK” can maintain viewer interest because the family members at the center of the story are all put in realistic circumstances. All the performances are capably delivered, with Siddharth as the obvious standout because Prabhu goes through the biggest metamorphosis, and the story is told mainly from his perspective. “3BHK” is ultimately a heartwarming film about the power of family love and never giving up in making a dream become a reality.

Shanthi Talkies released “3BHK” in select U.S. cinemas and in India on July 4, 2025.

Review: ‘Indian 2,’ starring Kamal Haasan, Siddharth, S. J. Suryah and Rakul Preet Singh

July 16, 2024

by Carla Hay

“Indian 2”

Directed by S. Shankar

Tamil with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in various parts of India, the action film “Indian 2” (a sequel to 1996’s “Indian”) features an all-Indian cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Four young adult YouTubers coax an outlaw vigilante to come out of hiding after he disappeared for 28 years, and the vigilante and his YouTube supporters go on the hunt to get justice for corruption.

Culture Audience: “Indian 2” will appeal primarily to people are fans of the first “Indian” movie and mindless vigilante stories.

Siddharth in “Indian 2” (Photo courtesy of Red Giant Movies)

“Indian 2” is nothing but a bloated mess. This idiotic and unnecessary sequel has tiresome clichés about a vigilante and his minions, who want corrupt people to be punished. The real punishment is watching this entire three-hour cinematic abomination. “Indian 2” (which is also titled “India 2: Zero Tolerance”) is filled with stupid-looking action sequences, hollow characters with no development, and time-wasting, reptetive scenes that didn’t need to be in the movie at all.

Written and directed by S. Shankar, “Indian 2” is a sequel to the 1996 action film “Indian,” which was directed and co-written by Shankar. Kamal Haasan reprises his role as vigilante Veerasekharan Senapathy, who is a former Indian National Army agent and who has the nickname Indian. The plot of “Indian 2” is so flimsy, it didn’t need to be a three-hour movie. This overlong running time makes the terrible movie even more irritating.

“Indian 2” (which takes place in various part of India) begins by showing four YouTuber friends in their 20s: Chitra Aravindhan (played by Siddharth), Aarthi Thangavel (played by Priya Bhavani Shankar), Thembash (played by Jagan) and Harish (played by Rishikanth). The four pals have a YouTube channel called Barking Dogs, which does political satires that poke fun at officials and leaders who are caught doing unethical things. These YouTubers use a lot of animation for their YouTube content.

Chitra, the leader of the Barking Dogs team, has a strong sense of morality and likes to help protect or defend underdogs. The other members of the Barking Dogs team have similar values. These values will be tested when they start investigating corruption that is very close to home.

One day, the community experiences a shocking and tragic event. A young woman named Sunitha flings herself off of a balcony and dies instantly. Chitra is one of the people on the street who witnessed this suicide.

Sunitha’s grieving brother tells the gathered crowd that Sunitha killed herself because corrupt officials demanded that she pay them bribes. When Sunitha refused, the officials told people that her college degree was fake. Sunitha couldn’t bear the shame, so she committed suicide.

Aside from all the illogical problems of this storyline (such as: colleges keep verifiable records of who graduated), the movie then stages an unrealistic impromptu protest at the suicide scene to have these corrupt officials arrested. Chitra is one of the most vocal people leading this protest, which also includes Arthi, Thembash and Harish.

The four friends get arrested and are bailed out by Chitra’s affluent girlfriend Disha (played by Rakul Preet Singh), who supports their cause but cautions them that they alone can’t change the world. Chitra, Arthi, Thembash and Harish get together and begin to wonder whatever happened to Indian, who made news for the events that happened in the “Indian” movie, but Indian has been missing since 1996. The four friends think that they should enlist the help of Indian, but they need to find him first.

Chitra comes up with the idea to start a social media campaign using the hashtag #ComeBackIndian. And sure enough, Indian finds out about the campaign, comes out of hiding. In an effort to look “modern,” Indian makes a social media video that he says is specifically aimed people under the age of 40. In this video, Indian makes a rallying statement for people to become social justice warriors against corruption by turning in corrupt people to the authorities.

The Barking Dogs friends take this advice to heart and start investigating people in their own family. Chitra’s father Varadharajan (played by Samuthirakani) is a police officer. Harish visits his uncle’s motel and discovers they serve stale food to customers. Thembash finds out that his brother-in-law, Nanjunda Moorthy, accepts bribes from customers, as does Aarthi’s mother, Kanagalatha.

Meanwhile, Indian doles out his own type of justice, which is often violent. Indian is a master of disguises and has hypnosis skills. And apparently, based on the movie’s very fake-looking action scenes, Indian also has superhuman-level strength and agility. One of the things that Indian likes to do in his hypnosis tricks is make people under hypnosis think that they are horses, and he tells them to run for the rest of their lives.

India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been on the hunt for Indian for the past 28 years because of what happened in the first “Indian” movie. Now that Indian as resurfaced, two CBI agents named Pramod Krishnaswamy (played by Bobby Simha) and Elango (played by Vivek) have been assigned to find and capture Indian. It should come as no surprise that Pramod and Elango repeatedly bungle the task, as Indian remains elusive. Why else would this bloated movie be three hours long?

One of the many problems with this disjointed movie is that the four Barking Dogs friends mostly work separately from Indian. There are large chunks of the movie that seem to completely forget all about the Barking Dogs friends. The separate storylines in “Indian 2” clumsily fail to blend cohesively when Indian and the Barking Dogs friends share the same scenes.

Most of the corruption in the movie’s ill-conceived plot has to do with bribery. The movie quickly becomes bogged down in unimaginative, repetitive scenarios of Indian donning disguises and doing his hypnosis tricks. There’s at least one other person who commits suicide out of “shame” related to corruption accusations. “Indian 2” also has a few bombastic song-and-dance musical scenes that look out-of-place and have forgettable songs.

The action sequences in “Indian 2” relentlessly insult viewers’ intelligence. Viewers are expected to believe that when Indian is cornered by about 20 muscular men in a fight, the men will stand around and take turns to get a chance to fight Indian. In reality, anyone who’s outnumbered this way would be quickly ganged up on and defeated, unless their opponent has a weapon that the others don’t.

One of the phoniest-looking action sequences is toward the end of the movie, when someone makes an escape by riding a unicycle. Viewers are expected to believe that this unicucle can outpace all the cars chasing after this unicyle. The person making the escape also does flips ona tunnel wall during this vehicle chase.

None of the acting performances in “Indian 2” is special. Some of it is downright awful. This movie clearly had a sizeable budget that was spent on production design (often gaudy) and visual effects (often fake-looking), but the movie’s production budget didn’t buy good film editing. There’s so much quick-cutting film editing that’s meant to make “Indian 2” look fast-paced, but it just looks like amateurish editing that can’t fix this abysmal screenplay.

Even with this choppy editing, “Indian 2” drags and gets boring because there’s so little substance to the movie’s story, which has a horrendous ending. A mid-credits montage gives a montage preview of what to expect in 2025’s “Indian 3,” and it looks just as awful as “Indian 2.” You’ve been warned.

Red Giant Movies released “Indian 2” in select U.S. cinemas and in India on July 12, 2024.

Review: ‘Ayalaan,’ starring Sivakarthikeyan, Rakul Preet Singh, Sharad Kelkar and Isha Koppikar

February 3, 2024

by Carla Hay

“Ayalaan”

Directed by R. Ravikumar

Tamil with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in India’s Tamil Nadu state, the sci-fi film “Fighter” features a predominantly Indian cast of characters (with a few white people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: A villager and his two friends discover and protect an outer-space alien that a corrupt scientist wants to capture because of the alien’s access to deadly mineral that the scientist want to use to make weapons of mass destruction.

Culture Audience: “Ayalaan” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of stories about aliens from outer space, no matter how stupid and long-winded the stories are.

Karunakaran, Kothandam, Tattoo, Yogi Babu and Sivakarthikeyan in “Ayalaan” (Photo courtesy of KJR Studios)

“Ayalaan” is a sloppy ripoff of the 1982 classic sci-fi film E.T., but with the outer-space alien befriending adults instead of children, as the movie’s ‘heroes’ try to prevent the alien from being captured. This misguided film is just time-wasting idiocy. “Ayalaan” has a very thin and flimsy plot that is dragged and stretched out to extremely irritating levels during the movie’s 155 minutes.

Written and directed by R. Ravikumar, “Ayalaan” (which means “alien” in Tamil) exposes itself very early in the movie to be a cinematic abomination of horrible dialogue, tacky visual effects, and bad acting. It would be slightly inaccurate to say that “Ayalaan” wears out its welcome because this type of torturous drivel isn’t welcome in the first place, if viewers are expecting anything that’s reasonably entertaining. There is almost no imagination in this extremely derivative and annoying movie.

The main protagonist in “Ayalaan” (which takes place in the India’s Tamil Nadu state) is a cheerful but dimwitted man in his late 30s named Tamizh (played by Sivakarthikeyan), who lives in a rural village, where he loves and respects the environment. Tamizh sells mineral water to people in the village. Tamizh’s social circle includes his two best friends—buffoonish Tyson (played by Yogi Babu) and neurotic Sugirtharaja (played by Karunakaran)—as well as Tamizh’s middle-aged, mute roommate (played by Kothandam), who doesn’t have a name in the movie.

A corrupt scientist/business mogul named Aryan (played by Sharad Kelkar), who is based in the city of Chennai, owns Aryan Industries, which looks like a combination of a corporation and a scientific research center. Aryan is obsessed with finding a rare mineral called Sparc (which looks like a glowing blue rock), which Aryan believes has the most powerful energy source in the world. Predictably, Aryan wants to get possession of Sparc to extract the energy source so that he can use it to make weapons of mass destruction. Aryan’s most loyal and most ruthless cohort is Eliza (played by Isha Koppikara), who’s supposed to be a scientist but who acts more like a combat criminal.

Meanwhile, a child-sized green alien, who has the voice of adult male human (voiced by Siddharth), arrives by spaceship from outer space to put a stop to Aryan’s plan. Before he left, the alien was warned by his look-alike girlfriend not to eat the the junk food on Earth. “Ayalaan” mentions that this is the alien’s 324th secret visit to Earth. The alien has the ability to make itself invisible whenever it wants.

The alien is captured by Aryan’s accomplices and is brought to a secret lab at Ayran Industries. The alien is kept in a giant glass cylinder. Why does Ayran want to keep this alien imprisoned? Somehow, Aryan finds out that this alien knows where to find Sparc, so Aryan want to force the alien to tell him where Sparc is.

But that doesn’t happen in this scene. Instead, when Aryan puts his hands on the cylinder, his hands get stuck. The alien uses it as an opportunity to emit a green gas that fills the cylinder before breaking the glass and escaping. The green gas floats out of the cylinder. Whatever is in the gas causes Aryan, Eliza and the others to lose consciousnesses.

Meanwhile, Tamizh finds himself at a science expo for middle schoolers. He has a crush on a science teacher named Tara (played by Rakul Preet Singh), so he is thrilled to see her there. One of the first exhibits that catches Tamizh’s attention is called “Alien World,” from a boy who’s dressed as a green alien. Tamizh starts a casual conversation with the boy, who says his name is Tattoo.

A certain mishap at the expo causes a big fire, where the alien shows up and catches Tara before she falls to the ground. (Don’t ask. It won’t be the last you’ll see of Tara, because she’s the obvious love interest of Tamizh.) Most of the people in the building evacuate in time, but Tamizh is stuck in the building. He sees the alien trapped underneath a fallen display case and rescues it. Tamizh and the alien manage to escape before the fire can kill them.

Tamizh thinks the alien is the boy Tattoo whom Tamizh met earlier. While he is driving the alien to a hospital, Tamizh keeps thinking that a human boy named Tattoo is in his truck with him, even though the alien is obviously not a human. This foolishness goes on for several minutes until Tamizh sees the alien become invisible. It’s only then that Tamizh understands that he has a non-human creature with him in the truck. He continues to call this creature Tattoo after he brings it home and introduces the alien to his friends.

The rest of “Ayalaan” has an increasingly ridiculous series of events. Just when the movie looks like it could have ended one way, there are insipid plot twists that prolong this appallingly jumbled and vapid movie. The alien is neither fun nor interesting, while all the human characters are either generic or very irritating, with performances from the cast members to match. Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” composer A.R. Rahman wrote the music for this junkpile movie, which just goes to show that having an Oscar does not make someone immune to working on low-quality dreck.

As an example of the shoddy filmmaking, there’s a subplot about an American named Dexter Williams (played by David Broughton-Davies), a UFO enthusiast who saw the alien during one of the alien’s previous visits to Earth. Dexter speaks Tamil in the film, but it’s obviously an overdubbed voice because the actor spoke English while filming his scenes. (People who can read lips while someone is talking can easily spot this discrepancy.)

Dexter has a hard time convincing people that his alien sightings are real. He’s determined to find the alien again and then track it down. Somehow, Aryan finds out that Dexter knows that the alien has landed on Earth again. And so, Aryan summons Dexter to India, where Dexter is enlisted to help find the alien. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

And did we mention that Tattoo has the ability to heal human injuries and diseases, just by placing his hands on the affected areas? The movie takes a detour into a vapid subplot about how Tattoo becomes invisible and does these healings when he’s with Tamizh. And it isn’t long before Tamizh gets credit for these healings and people think he has superpowers.

During all of these messy subplots, there are chase scenes, emotional meltdowns, and the usual mindless shenanigans that you would expect to find in a substandard “alien on the loose on Earth” movie, where the “heroes” try to help the alien find its way back to its home planet. There are also some out-of-place musical numbers that act as filler for this already bloated movie. In “Ayalaan,” everything is so dialed up to the most asinine levels, if any outer-space aliens saw this garbage film, then they’d want to fly far away on a spaceship and go home too.

KJR Studios released “Ayalaan” in select U.S. cinemas and in India on January 12, 2024.