It's Superstar Rajinikanth's birthday and Lingaa arrives as a much anticipated treat to everyone. The film is directed by K.S. Ravikumar, who has already delivered couple of promising evergreen entertainers like Muthu and Padaiyappa. Lingaa is significantly a special film as KS Ravikumar touches a unique genre of getting towards period and commercial portions together. Produced at a whopping budget, the film stars Sonakshi Sinha and Anushka Shetty in female lead characters with an ensemble star-cast of Jagapathi Babu, Dev Singh Gill, Santhanam, Karunakaran, Radharavi, Vijayakumar and many others in prominent roles.

 STORY

 The story opens at present situation, where a village head (K Viswanath) under some circumstance looks out for the grandson of Lingeshwaran (both played by Rajinikanth). Lingeshwaran has done lots of good deeds to the villagers by constructing dam for their well being. However, some British officers and few traitors beside him hatch evil plans and gain him bad reputation. Years later, his grandson Lingaa comes over to the same village pulled by such critical situations and is involved in the protection of dam for the villagers’ well being again.

 PERFORMANCE

 First and foremost, Rajinikanth deserves special mention for choosing such a unique script at this point of time. Rajinikanth’s performance in both the roles of Lingeshwaran aka Lingaa is worthy of appreciations. As a honest angry man in the period portions and as an young rejuvenated modern day Lingaa, he encompasses his best performance. The scene where he is overthrown by miscreants and his very own people, his emoting proficiency leaves us speechless for his dialogues and acting prowess. Very next to Rajinikanth, Sonakshi Sinha scintillates in her performance as Lingeshwaran’s wife. Anushka Shetty gets a neat role to score in commercial segments with Rajinikanth including a rocking duet ‘Mona Gasolina’. Santhanam evokes laughter in few places. Karunakaran has been wasted. Much was expected from Dev Singh Gill, but his role is too limited. Jagapathi Babu as baddie gets a prototyped role. After a long time, we tend to see the veteran actors like Radharavi and Vijayakumar getting decent roles to perform.

Plus

It’s not an easy task to handle such a script based on period genre that goes inclusive of enormous actors, huge sets and many locations. KS Ravikumar really deserves special appreciation for his ability to handle such things and completing the entire project in just six months. Rajinikanth as mentioned above delivers a promising performance in both the roles. Cinematography by Rathnavelu is a great asset to this film and art director Sabu Cyril has surpassed with his set works. Although, the film has a running length of three hours, it doesn’t bore us anywhere.

 Minus

When it comes to minus, the film has three hours of running length, which might not impress the audiences on entertainment. In fact, we go to theatres for an engaging commercial entertainer from Rajinikanth, but it doesn’t happen to be what we expect. Maybe, it’s a different genre of film that K.S. Ravikumar and Rajinikanth haven’t tried before. The makeover of Rajinikanth, especially for the modern times Lingaa role could have been better. There are some missing elements in the film. Say for instance, there is a scene where Rajinikanth talks about patriotism of National flag, where we find every character (around 500 artists) pinned with Indian national flags to their dresses expressing their National patriotism, but Rajinikanth doesn’t have it tagged, which ruins the entire significance of this drama. The computer generated graphic works are slightly unconvincing as some of  Green matte effects for songs and stunt sequences  look little amateur. The sequences involving the confrontations between Jagapathi Babu and Rajinikanth create less impact. This is merely because, the actual village backdrop happens only in a time frame of couple or few days. Background score by Rahman isn’t appealing.

 Overall, Lingaa comes as a different and unexpected flick from the combination of KS Ravikumar and Rajinikanth. For the ones, who love to watch Rajinikanth as a magical saviour amusing us vividly with his action, this one might not complete engage them for it turns to be a performance oriented character for the legend actor.

Verdict : Appeals to Rajnikanth fans, but screenplay could’ve been more engaging.

Stars : 2.5/5