Sundeep Kishan plays Guru, a man who’s down on his luck and is heavily in debt. On the other side, the man with tons of money is a gangster named Kotalapadi Veerayya Reddy, played by Sampath. We seem to be in for some kind of heist movie, but there’s no suspense, no thrills, no sense of real danger. The film isn’t unwatchable, but all we have is a sense of what could have been. That’s the basic storyline and the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain a few minor spoilers. 
I have a theory. I think Jason Sanjay is a cinephile who thinks in terms of hat-tips and homage. I think Sampath was cast as a gangster in Sigma because the actor played a gangster in Aaranya Kaandam. In his promotional interviews, Jason also mentioned Jigarthanda as an influence, and from that film we have the actor Kaalaiyan, who played the small-time goon who liked to watch porn. A minor character in Sigma is named Manick Baasha. And most interesting, I think, is the reason for the casting of Sundeep Kishan. Sundeep was in Maanagaram, and at least based on this first film, Jason seems to share Lokesh Kanagaraj’s fondness for 80s/90s Hollywood action movies filled with guns and drugs. In an era where money has moved online, we get a huge locker filled with bundles of cash. And even this locker does not have a combination lock, but instead there’s a key that’s hidden inside a device with a delightfully cheesy skull-like design.
I liked the basic idea. Veerayya Reddy has something that Guru wants: money. And Guru has something that Veerayya Reddy wants: the key to open the locker. How will their paths collide, and how will the good guys win over the bad guys? Sigma follows this regular outline of a heist movie. But the writing is sluggish and the film never really takes off. Sigma has tangents that are interesting on paper. The ageing henchman of a gambling boss falls for a woman who works for Veerayya. This is an unexpectedly happy turn of events for a man who thought he’d spend the rest of his life alone, taking orders from his boss. There’s also the doped-out character played by Anbu Thasan. This could have made for an unusual comic track about the hero’s friend who’s funny but also a bit of a scatterbrain when it comes to executing complex plans. I liked the idea that Guru is, of all things, a librarian. I liked the Karthik Subbaraj-esque idea that a loan shark’s wife is made to do a podcast.
But Sigma is stuck at the ideas level. These ideas don’t come together in the cheesy-retro way that I wanted them to, and neither does the film work as a slick modern-day thriller. I never understood why it takes so long to get to the heist portions. After all, this is not a drama that needs to establish Guru’s desperation in great detail. Or even if this was some kind of subversion, where Jason is saying he’ll make us wait for the main course we have signed up for, the events up to that point aren’t interesting. Faria Abdullah plays a sketchily designed heroine. Catherine Teresa is an item girl named Suluru Sulochana. And the film commits the unforgivable sin of killing a dog for no reason. Heck, John Wick brought down an entire criminal empire because one of the bad guys killed his dog. Here, Guru sheds a few tears and that’s it. Had Sigma not been made by Jason, who is who he is, it would have been filed under the category of yet another Friday, yet another newcomer, yet another middling movie.
