Whenever any of our actors begin to show an interest in politics, their movies become tools for them to put forward their political views and personal virtues. With Vijayakanth now active in politics, its no surprise that his Virudhagiri, which he has also directed, has several overt political touches. While this limits the film's appeal to Vijayakanth's fans, the film's bigger offense is that its second half is a blatant rip-off of Hollywood flick Taken.

Virudhagiri(Vijayakanth) is an honest, conscientious ADGP whose exploits range from nabbing local criminals involved in organ harvesting to helping Scotland Yard foil a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. In his house live a woman whose husband once saved Virudhagiri's dad's life and her daughter Priya(Meenakshi Dixit). Priya and her friend go to Australia where they are kidnapped by some foreigners. So Virudhagiri heads to Australia to get them back.

With Tamilnadu's history of close association between politics and cinema, we've always had movies where the heroes spouted political double entendres under various pretenses. With Virudhagiri all pretense has been dropped. With Vijayakanth's party flag showing up in several places, a title song that praises him as the savior of the people and every other line of dialog openly referring to the current political scenario and/or his political ambition, the film doesn't hide its intentions of being a propaganda tool. While all these will make his party cadres and fans rejoice, it does nothing for those not belonging to those groups.

With Vijayakanth's trip to Scotland Yard and the capture of the kingpin behind the transgender kidnapping, the first half plays out like a disconnected series of skits showcasing Vijayakanth as a supercop. Atleast those parts are original and there are a few scenes of Vijayakanth using his brain as he investigates the case. That originality is lost once the main story kicks off. From the point where the girl goes to Australia, the movie becomes a rip-off of Hollywood film Taken. This is not a clever adaptation where the basic storyline is taken and then modified to suit our sensibilities. It is a shameless copy with every turn in the plot and most scenes lifted as-is from the original.

The mild silver lining in this blatant copying is that needless distractions like an awkward comedy track or a silly romance have not been inserted. How much of a good thing this is becomes evident towards the end when the film deviates from the original's storyline. Not content with Vijayakanth unearthing a prostitution racket, the film tries to cursorily tie in everything from the attack in Indian students in Australia to the earlier transgender kidnapping. This ends up looking amateurish and silly.

Vijayakanth looks chubby which makes his chases and fights against the lean, mean bad guys rather laughable. Meenakshi Dixit isn't onscreen long enough to make an impression. Arun Pandian plays an officer in the Australian Police while Mansoor Ali Khan is his usual self as a corrupt local cop.