That bird CGI in the opening montage is just terrible. Not the whole bird, mind you, just the way the feathers shift like cheap velvet when the camera pans past a static sky. If I'm honest, that kind of jitter sets the tone for an eight-thousand-screen juggernaut that cost more than small nations spend on healthcare. Shankar is back in the director's chair with a budget that must have required its own zip code, and the man simply refuses to film a conversation in a normal room. Every single dialogue scene has to happen inside a dome made of glass, atop a revolving skyscraper, or in a laboratory that looks like a spaceship engine room built by a megalomaniac with a fetish for blue LEDs.

The screenplay is essentially just three different action sequences wearing a trench coat and pretending to be a cohesive narrative about mobile phones. Dr. Vaseegaran, played by Rajinikanth with the weary grace of an eighty-year-old athlete who knows he has to jump through one more flaming hoop because the contract says so, builds a new assistant who looks exactly like Amy Jackson. This robot named Nila has an introduction scene where she cooks instant noodles while reciting prime numbers, and then the movie immediately forgets she can cook because someone forgot to write her into the second act. The plot kicks into gear when every smartphone in Chennai suddenly starts vibrating off tables, flying through the air, and clustering together like angry bees to form giant CGI monsters that swallow politicians whole.

Enter Akshay Kumar as Richard, an ornithologist who commits mass suicide by hanging himself from a cellular tower after his birds die from radiation poisoning. He returns from the dead as a weird crow-spirit amalgamation made of millions of phones, and his motivations are surprisingly earnest for a movie featuring a giant metal bird made of Nokia devices fighting a robot shaped like a human face. Akshay does this thing with his shoulders where he hunches over like he's carrying a sack of wet cement, which gives his villainous physical presence an actual weight that the digital effects are constantly trying to undermine. He plays the antagonist in Hindi films with a snarling, throat-clearing intensity that feels totally disconnected from whatever dubbed dialogue is coming out of the speakers, but it works anyway because he commits to the bit with zero irony.

Rajinikanth still has that specific way of flicking his sunglasses off his wrist that makes multiplex audiences lose their minds, even when he is mostly reacting to a tennis ball on a stick while standing in front of a green screen the size of a cricket pitch. Chitti returns in the final forty minutes as a miniature red version of himself that lives inside the original robot's chest cavity, and that specific visual gag is funnier than anything in the entire comedy track. Amy Jackson spends most of the runtime walking through hallways in silver trousers while looking mildly concerned about the state of telecommunications, functioning more as a piece of polished chrome furniture than a character with agency. It's a small thing, but her hair never seems to get mussed by the hurricane-force wind machines that Shankar deploys in literally every outdoor setup, which becomes mildly hypnotic once you notice it.

A.R. Rahman delivered a score that sounds like a brass band falling down an elevator shaft during a thunderstorm, trading his usual melodic touch for metallic shrieks and sub-bass frequencies designed to rattle the popcorn out of your lap. Nirav Shah's cinematography moves with the frenetic energy of a caffeinated wasp, refusing to let any single shot linger for more than two seconds before whipping around another CGI pillar or diving into a canyon of dead electronics. There is an entire sequence set inside a stadium where the phones attack the audience, and the camera work here is so aggressively digital that you can practically smell the overheated graphics cards melting behind the projection booth. The sheer scale of the waste is staggering, but you have to admire the chutzpah required to spend that much money on a sequence where a giant bird made of Samsung Galaxies gets beaten up by a swarm of microscopic red robots.

Beneath the bluster about electromagnetic fields and the death of house sparrows, the film is actually terrified of modern communication technology. It treats every ping, notification, and ringtone as a demonic possession vector, which feels like a very cranky, middle-aged way to look at how humanity interacts with handheld screens. This conservative anxiety about the youth being too glued to their devices sits very strangely in a production that relies entirely on computer-generated spectacle to keep the audience from checking their own phones during the dull patches. You watch the characters rant about tower radiation for ten minutes straight before the movie pauses to let Rajinikanth shoot laser beams out of his finger joints, and the hypocrisy of the messaging becomes almost charming in its utter lack of self-awareness.

The climax involves a battle on a bridge that goes on for so long you start calculating how many actual cell towers could have been built with the electricity used to render the dust particles alone. When the credits finally roll, there is no sense of resolution, just a lingering headache from the high-frequency sound design and the memory of Akshay Kumar shouting about bird rights into a rain-slicked lens. It's an exhausting exercise in cinematic excess that somehow circles back around to being entertaining purely through the sheer weight of its own ridiculousness.