We've had both good and bad movies from directors(Cheran, S.J.Suryah, Thankar Bachan) when they turned into actors. It looks like the winds are blowing in the opposite direction now since in quick succession, we've had 2 actors, Simbhu and Sarathkumar, take up direction. Unfortunately, the results are not encouraging. Like Vallavan, Thalaimagan seems to have been made just to feed the ego of its hero. Though Sarathkumar plays an investigative reporter, the film is simply another shabbily-made movie that features him as a superman and the savior of the people.

Dheeran(Sarathkumar) is a reporter for the magazine Everest, whose editor(Vijayakumar) runs the magazine to bring the truth to the people rather than to make money. Meghala(Nayanthara) is another reporter working for the same magazine. When a corrupt minister Shanmugavadivelu(Mukesh Tiwari) accepts money and authorizes a mineral water factory that will dry up its surrounding villages, Dheeran questions his decision. So the minister targets the editor, thinking that the magazine will close up if the editor is eliminated. But that only strengthens Dheeran's resolve.

Thalaimagan is as cliched as a Tamil movie can get. Every aspect of it, from the story to the characters to the script, feels ancient and almost every single sequence gives the feeling of having seen it before. The hero crusading against corruption, his loving family waiting to be used as pawns to attack him, the corrupt minister, the corrupt lady cop who is hand-in-glove with him... all these are characters have been seen a million times before and the story they populate doesn't contain a single twist or surprise. Sarathkumar, as director, does not possess the style or technique that could have fashioned an entertaining screenplay out of the familiar elements and so the end result is a movie that is a chore to watch.

Sarathkumar delivers Thalaimagan as a narcissistic ode to himself. Our heroes always deliver punch dialogs, walk in slo-mo during key scenes and have the people surrounding them sing praises of them. With Sarathkumar himself at the helm, these gimmicks occur more than usual in the film. And he hasn't let the fact that he is a reporter come in the way of them. He barely does any reporting as he fights with rowdie and romances Nayanthara. Worse, the self-boosting is done shoddily and ends up being irritating rather than exhilarating. A case in point is this exchange that occurs in the movie
Policewoman(to Sarath): What do you mean?
Sarath: I mean what you cannot mean... Confusing, isn't it?
Confusing, it certainly is because I still cannot figure out what he wanted to convey!

The outdated nature of the story is only matched by the outrageousness of the screenplay in the second half. Starting with a ridiculous escape from an exploding car that sees Sarathkumar end up in Kerala, the movie piles up one unbelievable coincidence after another in its attempt to bring things to closure. Great leaps of intuition(like the way Sarath figures out the location of some files from a name and some numbers), glaring loopholes(how did Nayanthara figure out the same location?) and incredibly dumb acts by the minister(who throws his files out in a garbage pail on news of a raid) turn the film into a cartoon by the time the climax arrives. And for the record, this movie selects the worst location for the hero and heroine to launch into a dream song!

Sarath looks quite old but unlike Vijayakanth, his physique atleast makes the stunts believable. He should definitely stick only to acting after this. Nayanthara looks completely lost and its never clear whether she's a bumbling, ineffective journalist or an ace reporter. Mukesh Tiwari creates one of the worst villains in recent memory with his ranting and raving. Seema Biswas is wasted in the cliched role of a corrupt, sadistic cop. Vadivelu isn't given much opportunity to try and make us laugh and remains in the sidelines. His track starts off resembling the one in Thalainagaram as he thinks Nayanthara is interested in him but cools off soon.