Indian male superstars have a difficult time from their 40s onwards. From soft romances and emotional dramas in their youth, they graduate to violent action films, with VFX often taking care of their once-famous physiques. These trends originate from society’s age-old belief that one is supposed to behave a certain way after a certain age. For sure, things are changing, which is why rare attempts like Vishwanath & Sons, with a major star like Suriya looking and playing his age, are welcome.
Is Venky Atluri’s film the game-changer we need in 2026?
The premise is easy to imagine with Suriya in it. Think of a spiritual sequel to Ghajini after two decades, where Sanjay (Suriya) is cured of his retrograde amnesia but is still in trauma of losing Kalpana. A billionaire back then, he is now a trillionaire who takes foreign trips every month-end, buys hotels as if they’re sold on Amazon, and has the minister’s number saved on his phone as, well, “Minister”. He resides in a palace that looks like it gets repainted every day.
Sanjay is also an Olympic gold medalist (in shooting, no less), though the film seems to forget this right after the early reels. He lives with his loving mother Nirmala (Radikaa Sarathkumar), has a Man Friday in his cousin Ram (Sunil Reddy), and an army of efficient staff. The only thing missing from this picture-perfect existence is a wife and an heir to all that wealth.
The man refuses to get married, and he isn’t gay. His mother is perplexed because a certain family photo won’t expand after she dies. Typical dynastic worries, but we get it. To solve the heir issue, Sanjay puts his money to work. He has a baby through IVF abroad, only for his son, Abhay, to later need a bone marrow transplant that can be provided only by his biological mother.
Enter Maddy (Mamitha Baiju), a 22-year-old Kalpana-incarnate in Los Angeles who is in dire need of fast cash to fund her education, so she rents out her womb. However, in Vishwanath & Sons, our Richie Rich protagonist doesn’t fall for the girl’s manic-pixie niceness, although everyone else does. The conservative mother, who seemed like a tough cookie, buys into her sob stories in a matter of hours. Everything goes fine until it’s time for Maddy to return.
And, to no one’s surprise, the girl has fallen in love with our tough, mega-benevolent hero. This becomes the overlong film’s interval.
In principle, Vishwanath & Sons is a progressive family entertainer with noble things to say. However, its feel-good skin peels away the moment the film can no longer contain its leading man’s messiah complex. Throughout the film, there’s no inkling of a romance, not even a gesture, from Sanjay towards Maddy. Why is Atluri hell-bent on making them unite? At one point, we’re told Sanjay is attracted only to women over 30, and he never quite gives a clear answer to Maddy’s query about their age gap.
Which brings up the bigger question: what on earth is Maddy falling in love with?
Sanjay isn’t a particularly good father. He is hyper-rich, so he funds a youngster’s education and later refuses to take the loan amount back. Soon he goes on to serve a nice moral science lesson on caring for aged parents on live television. Sanjay beats up some lecherous men who fight with Maddy. In a battle for chicken momos, he nearly buys a hotel to prove a point. Plus, he is a mama’s boy who has a 2000-model cellphone to speak only with her.
Seeing all this, our USA-bred girl wants to trade her medical career and become his wife. How does it make sense?
When Vishwanath & Sons attempts to unpack why Sanjay rejects marriage, it devolves into preaching and normalising male infidelity, declaring that it’s okay to have a “chinnaveedu” arrangement even in this day and age. Sure, it’s nice to see the women remain cordial instead of getting into the usual catfights and property disputes. But the film eventually uses that maturity to push a far more regressive idea: men will stray anyway, and women simply have to learn to live with it.
The casual mentions of secret Bangkok trips still land as humour. But when the other woman (Raveena Tandon) serves a sermon on how the female brain ticks, any sane person would lose it.
This is particularly frustrating because Vishwanath & Sons actually has the scope to address deeper issues like childhood trauma. Sanjay’s relationship with his father (Rajiv Menon, a lovely actor) could have been the emotional core of the film, offering a grounded reason for his resistance to marriage. Atluri’s writing doesn’t want to do any of the actual work. Sanjay is never sent to a therapist. He would rather have epiphanies at convenient intervals to go about fixing things himself.
At one point, he is seen with a sticky notepad on which he writes a to-do list for the day. Vishwanath & Sons unfolds exactly like that: Sanjay fixes everything – from bicycles to rifles to relationships. He fixes the mess his father created, his relationship with his stepmother and hers with her parents. He fixes Maddy’s career and his sister’s marital problems. Towards the end, he even channels his cuckoo logic towards Maddy in the right direction.
At this point, the screenplay becomes the only thing that needs some fixes.
If the writing is designed to worship its hero, the filmmaking cuts no new ground either. Vishwanath & Sons comes up with many interesting ideas, only to abandon them before they can go anywhere. Sanjay coming to terms with his stepmother and stepsister should have had more depth than simply being an act of obedience to his mother. Atluri’s storytelling seems determined to spoon-feed us with visual cues and dialogue that we really don’t need.
Similarly, every tense sequence seems to come with a mandatory full-circle tracking shot.
The film repeatedly establishes small behavioural differences between Sanjay and Maddy, but does little with them. Sanjay has a problem with sharing his plate or glass with Maddy while she is perfectly okay with it. If there’s an unknown theory that millennials don’t share their plates while Gen Z does, it’s all in the makers’ heads.
In place of meaningful psychological conflict, Vishwanath & Sons gives Sanjay a bunch of buffoon-like villains who are only a thrashing away from becoming his servants. At a time when men in Indian society would go to any extent to satisfy their egos, Atluri’s solutions feel childish. Even more so are the slow-motion action sequences with some strange wirework, where local goons defy physics just so that Sanjay can strike his hero stances.
Among the consistently good things is Suriya. You simply won’t take your eyes off the actor, who is aging like exotic wine. There’s a scene where he breaks down with grief, and you can’t help but wonder how underutilized his craft is. He can communicate layers that the writing doesn’t seem interested in exploring.
Mamitha Baiju is spirited in a part cut from the same cloth as Ghajini’s Asin. Vishwanath & Sons does sideline her in the latter half, but she’s never really out of sight or out of our minds.
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Radikaa Sarathkumar is all heart in an entirely stereotypical character, showing again what a good actor can do with half-baked material. Raveena Tandon, who is closer to Suriya’s age, made me wonder if she had been Sanjay’s opportunistic ex who turned him anti-marriage. The film has other plans, although a teleprompter would have done wonders for the luminous actor’s lip-syncing. Surprisingly, Nasser is irritating when he is supposed to be endearing, while Bhavani Sre shines in the one scene she gets.
The narrative completely breaks down in the finale. Even after Vishwanath & Sons resolves all its problems following Sanjay’s fixing spree, I was never sure what his problem actually was. A 20-year age gap shouldn’t matter to a progressive, educated loner like him. Nor is he stopping Maddy from struggling and living life on her terms. He gives her everything on a platter, from her course fee to a hospital to run.
So what exactly is he fighting?
The finale, which stretches endlessly for a good 20 minutes, reminded me of Suniel Shetty’s random coming-around in Dhadkan.
And Maddy, honey, you aren’t eyeing his money. How about some self-respect? Aren’t you the student who allegedly lost a scholarship by one mark? How does a woman who fought tooth and nail to become a doctor find her soulmate in a man who could barely be bothered to give her the time of day? Maddy should have known better than to fall for the tired old “marry a man to fix him” trope.
That is precisely where Vishwanath & Sons loses its own argument. It wants to tell us that age needn’t define romance, but at the cost of validating misogyny. It says men can be vulnerable, but they must also tick the boxes of machismo. As per its logic, families can take unconventional forms, until you mould them into a socially accepted one. This way, whenever it comes close to saying something genuinely heartfelt, the film retreats into the safest possible fantasy.
Vishwanath & Sons closes on a note where everybody is happy. Sanjay is happy playing saviour. Maddy is happy that the guy came around for reasons unknown. The family and the staff are happy. The audience is expected to be happy too. My immediate thought was whether Sanjay would continue his month-end international conference rituals. And given the way Maddy is, she’d probably just hide his passport rather than address the issue.
Some happily-ever-after, that would be.
VERDICT: ★★ 1/2
For more reviews of Vishwanath & Sons, head to the Film Critics Guild.
