Mookuthi Amman 2 movie review: Nayanthara cannot save this loud, hollow devotional fantasy
The Indian Express · Yashaswini Sri ·
Mookuthi Amman 2 movie review: Sundar C’s Mookuthi Amman 2: Maha Sakthi swaps the original’s sharp satire for large-scale devotional fantasy, and the trade is not a good one. No amount of divine intervention can fix a screenplay that confuses scale with substance.
Mookuthi Amman 2 movie review and rating: I am fairly sure someone on the writing team came across an astrology retrograde explainer on the internet, saw phrases like “planetary alignment”, “dormant energy returning” and “things from the past resurfacing”, and decided that was a screenplay. Because Mookuthi Amman 2 is literally the concept of retrograde turned into a movie. Evil that has been buried for 2,000 years? Retrograde. It resurfaces when the planets align? Retrograde. The past catches up with the present in ways nobody asked for? Retrograde. The film feels like an astrology Instagram post stretched to two and a half hours. Everything about this film is in reverse, except Nayanthara, who is the only thing moving forward.
The sequel has no narrative connection to the first film Mookuthi Amman (2020). This is an entirely new story in which Nayanthara plays an ordinary police officer who begins experiencing recurring nightmares involving a mysterious village called Mailanji. The visions involve a warrior on horseback, an ancient queen’s sacrifice and a darkness that is stirring again after 2,000 years. Circumstances eventually lead Nayanthara to the village, where she begins to uncover the connection between herself, Mailanji and the goddess Mookuthi Amman. A mistake during that original battle 2000 years ago forced the goddess to end her own avatar, and now the same evil has returned.
Nayanthara remains the film’s biggest and most consistent asset. She has always had the screen presence to play a goddess convincingly, and she carries the role with a grace and authority that the material does not always deserve.
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