Singam 3 was shot during a raging typhoon. That's the only possible explanation for the way everything in the film simply fllllliiiiieeees. From human beings to cars.
The people appear to be in a massive hurry too. Their lines are rushed, their actions, even more so. Shot mainly in Vizag, characters jump into planes, hop across oceans, beat each other up, yell threats over smartphones and it's all over before you can say, "Wha?!"
Released after several delays, the third in the Singam franchise is a cop film on acid with plenty of manic "nationalism". Imagine, there's even a sequence when the villain, who has no respect for India, tells a white woman he's battering (in order to threaten her husband for information), that if only the man had been Indian, he'd have given away the information well before his wife was treated so brutally. Because obviously, Indian husbands = world's best.
If even the villain is capable of such sentiments, must we ask about the hero? The gravity-defying scene in which Singam (Suriya) makes an entry has him thulping a bunch of goons and yelling that he's not TN police or AP police but "INNNDDIAANN police!" The declaration is so loud that I'm pretty sure the jawans at Siachen heard him.
Somewhere along the way, he goes from Indian police to "universal cop" but you couldn't care less. Director Hari's first two films in the series worked because they had a strong plot. Sure, they were bombastic and there was a good amount of fantasy involved in the super cop's characterisation but at the end of the day, they had a story to tell. There was something for the lion to hunt.
Singam 3, on the other hand, is a patchwork product. Item numbers + mandatory second heroine + stunt sequences + low IQ villains. The script is embarrassing. At one point, when Singam is stopped at an Australian airport on the suspicion that he's a drug dealer, the Australian cops let him off after watching a YouTube video of him in khaki. The narrative is heavily dependent on technology hacking but the storytelling is so lazy that this could have been a Vijaykanth film with Paintbrush presented to you as "advanced software".
Anushka Shetty appears as Singam's wife once again but is barely there. Oh, she gets to be nationalistic too. At an international airport, she tells the female security officer that she cannot remove her thali because she's an Indian woman. Are we still in the days of Andha Ezhu Naatkal? In the few scenes that she does appear, however, there's that old warmth between the couple that I wish we could have seen some more of.
Shruti Haasan (who I suppose was included because of her popularity in Tollywood) is modeled pretty much on Hansika's character in the second film, only much dumber. She plays an "investigative" journalist who… surprise!... falls in love with the macho cop.
Singam tells her things like "ponnunga police station vara koodadhu" (women shouldn’t come to the police station), "ponnunga indha maari edathuku vara koodadhu" (women shouldn’t come to such places) - why the why, Suriya? You're one actor who hasn't done this "advising women" thing in your films too much. Why get into it now? Let ponnunga decide what they should do for themselves please. You'd be doing them a greater favour than making numerous dosas.
Thakur Anoop Singh is the chief villain. He'd be perfect for a shampoo commercial, given his lovely hair, but fails to excite proceedings in the tacky plot. His Tamil is strange, his English is stranger (definitely doesn't sound Aussie if that's what he was going for) and it's hard to take the man's yelling seriously.
By the time Singam 3 makes its way to a tired finish without a single surprise thrown at you, your eardrums are throbbing from the assault (Harris Jayaraj have mercy!). Suriya looks superbly fit, his moustache is a work of art. But the film's too noisy to even ogle him in peace.