Sekhar is assembling the city’s most tenacious rowdies under one roof for the birthday party of Choolai Babu, a 50-year-old who dresses like he’s 18, and Ashwath suspects the city is in danger. So, a covert operation begins. If Ashwath needs to get to Sekhar, he needs to go through every small gangster with a colourful prologue. And this band of rowdies include Ice Box, a man who got the name for smuggling illegal funds in ice box coffins during elections, the hilarious Mava Sait, a black magic believer who was once believed to have dug up a corpse for a ritual, and Jail Kuyil, a pot-head with the voice of an angel. And then of course there is Sekhar himself, played effortlessly by Manikandan, a gangster who has climbed up the ranks by flexing his wit (“Arivum Ayudhamum” is how he is described).
Pacy, Edgy and Conscious
The band of soldiers on Ashwath’s side is no less and two women, in particular, stand out for their grit and ease of depiction — Sayanthika Biswas (Dilnaz Irani), the commissioner of police who puts her head on the line to chair the operation, and Niralya, a cybercrime consultant, without whose tactical knowledge, the operation would crumble. But the lovely thing about these ordinary women being extraordinary at their jobs is how the show registers their true lives. The first time we see Sayanthika is at leisure at her sprawling apartment, solving a crisis at home, while gearing up to solve another crisis in the city. She makes sure that every man answers to her, with the might of every last cell in her body. And her husband (Gautham Vasudev Menon) is happy to step aside. “I am proud to be Sayanthika’s Prince Consort,” he scoffs at a minister’s sexist remark at one point.