Even Kamal Haasan can’t rise above the shockingly inept script, which he rescues only in a few places, when his trademark intelligent, wry self-awareness manages to kick in. The rest can be safely ignored.

Kamal Haasan is one of the most versatile actors in the country, but he misses the target by a mile in Vishwaroopam 2.

The action set pieces also suffer in comparison to Vishwaroopam. If that film had the thrilling sow motion fight sequence, this time Kamal takes upon himself to have close quarter combats over and over again. Brutal and violent, the fights get tiring after a while.

That, however, is not the biggest problem of Vishwaroopam. That indubitably is Kamal directing the film as a director and not filmmaker. We can see the savvy politician Kamal is doing great onscreen. Wisam, unfortunately, is lost in the back ground.

Vishwaroop 2 is a motion picture conceived almost entirely inside Kamal Haasan’s bedroom without him even bothering to take a walk outside.

This means that every single thing in Vishwaroop 2 is reduced to Haasan’s reading of that thing, his feeling for that thing, his excitement for that thing, and also his limited understanding of that thing.

It repeatedly fires blanks – noisy but of no use. Has a movie sequel ever been so pointless?

Vishwaroop 2 is a classic example of overkill. This multi-lingual film has been shot in both Hindi and Tamil. And despite having some genuinely good moments, the film tries to put forth a little too much, a little too quickly.

Vishwaroop 2 boasts of some great cameos by Shekhar Kapur, Waheeda Rahman and Jaideep Ahlawat but they are so good in whatever little screen-time they have got that sometimes you feel they are wasted in the film. The spy-thriller doesn’t rely much on jingoism, though, which is a relief.

Vishwaroop 2 is a reminder that killing off a villain in the first part is always better than keeping him alive especially when he is on the verge of dying anyway. Haasan could have invested his energies on something more constructive – his second last Sabaash Naidu sounds fun – and audiences would have been spared a dull film.

The story picks up from where it left the viewers in Vishwaroop, but unnecessary flashbacks and subplots take away from the narrative rather than adding to it

Apart from the shock value of the extreme violence it features and a vital statement about fundamentalism-versus-education, Vishwaroop II has nothing new to offer. It is a scar on Haasan’s filmography and a dead bore.

For someone who does not know how espionage actually operates, Vishwaroopam 2 is fairly engaging stuff. The London portion has a bit of history infused in it, which is genuinely interesting. However, the film is flat and fails to excite as much as we hoped it would.