This is a morality tale about the price of success, told with tons of humour and emotion. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll leave on a high. The rest of this review contains spoilers.
And the award for the most misleading trailer of 2025 goes to… DRAGON! You look at the trailer and see a girl saying bad boys are cool. You see a guy thinking it’s cool to have 48 arrears. You see this guy being cool with a cigarette, as though he’s invented a move to rival Rajinikanth’s style with cigarettes. Even when the movie begins, we seem to be in that zone. Pradeep Ranganathan and Anupama Parameswaran play Ragavan and Keerthi, two college-goers in love, and in their first scene together, she is exposing her hip to him. She wants him to see a tattoo, but he’s awestruck by that expanse of flesh. You really begin to think that writer-director Ashwath Marimuthu has become a “bad boy” like our hero. And then, he begins to systematically dismantle everything we thought this movie was going to be.
Pradeep Ranganathan is perfectly cast as Ragavan, aka Dragon. (There’s a clever explanation for the title.) The actor’s persona from Love Today comes through strongly in the early portions, where we see an obnoxious man-child who exploits everyone around him: his loving middle-class parents, his friends, his girlfriend who fell for him when she thought bad boys are cool, and even his boss (played by Gautam Menon). And then, Ashwath slowly – very slowly – works on this persona and turns him into someone we don’t quite expect. What’s beautiful is that this transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Ragavan’s lying and cheating continue even after you think he’s reformed, and this is what makes the movie ring true. It’s the fact that you cannot change overnight. Ashwath is not kidding when he says he idolises Frank Capra. Once again after Oh My Kadavule, we get the concept of reliving a version of your life until you get it right.
If someone told you about the themes of Dragon, you might run away screaming – because it sounds like the biggest “lecture movie” possible. (1) Bad boys may be cool to hang out with, but gradually, girls will grow up and want more. (2) The mistakes you make will come back to haunt you. (3) The mistakes you make will come back to haunt even innocent people around you. (4) It’s only in the movies that you can become successful over the course of a song. In real life, you have to work hard to succeed. (5) Your bad actions can have an effect far down the line, thanks to stupid people who hero-worship your so-called coolness. Every Dragon will beget a Kutty Dragon. (6) … Okay, I’ll stop here. But you get the picture.
But the miracle of the movie is in the writing, which is outstanding for a number of reasons. One, there is no wasted scene. From beat to beat, the scene segues are super-clean. Even the songs are perfectly placed. Two, the film never stops being engaging. The funny scenes make you laugh. The emotional scenes make you cry. The only misstep is the hero’s articulation of the message at the end. Suddenly, we land in a lecture zone. Otherwise, everything lands superbly, as intended. And three, every set-up has a payoff. A casual mention of Swiggy, a casual scene with Sneha, a casual mention of a girl named Harini, a casual habit of flicking a cigarette, a casual chat with a Muslim neighbour – every damn thing in this screenplay returns with a big, fat payoff.
Ashwath seems to write what he wants, but with a sure eye on the audience. A fight sequence in the second half looks like a throwback to a fight in the first half, but the genius touch is what happens in the background, with the character who calls himself Kutty Dragon. Mysskin is simply wonderful as a college principal who is this film’s version of God, like Vijay Sethupathi in Oh My Kadavule. He is the man who gives Ragavan a second chance, and every scene with him is a cracker, with either comedic value or emotional value. Anupama Parameswaran aces a role that has her as a kind of sex object, but also someone who acts as a conscience keeper. Her character’s latter-half scenes show that helping is a form of healing. Some may disagree that she needs to be healed in the first place, but there’s no doubting that this is a woman with dignity and compassion.
Kayadu Lohar is very effective as Ragavan’s fiancée, as are VJ Siddhu and Harshath Khan. Pradeep Ranganathan is tested with new depths of emotion, and he rises to the challenge. He is solid. He sells Ragavan with conviction. I wished George Maryan and Indumathy Manikandan had been given more to do in the second half. I loved them as Ragavan’s parents, whose goodness makes Ragavan seem even more horrible. But George Maryan gets a super-emotional scene at the end that made me tear up. These are not radical screenwriting discoveries. This is just solid, confident, old-fashioned storytelling with the belief that it is important to engage the audience emotionally. With the exception of Ragavan’s loser friends, we end up caring about every single character. But then, even these loser friends get a redeeming bit, in a scene that depicts the sleeping equivalent of a group hug. They may be idiots, but they were there for Ragavan at a time of need.
The arcs are all in place. In an early scene, Ragavan himself expresses the feeling that he may not be a conventional good-looker. The Kayadu Lohar character knows this, and she doesn’t just say yes to Ragavan. She wants to make sure he has what she wants in a man. But this stretch is inventively done – not too seriously, not too comically, but with just enough of an entertainment quotient. There is a bit with a girl in a swimsuit. There is a fun song filled with swearing. There are scenes of smoking and drinking and using a vulgar word that rhymes with “paambu”. In words, Ashwath is not clueless about what “young male audiences” supposedly want. But everything comes with context. And towards the end, the way the tension keeps mounting with twist after twist, even when you think it’s all over, is exactly the kind of thing you want in mainstream cinema. It all ends on a big high. If Pradeep Ranganathan is this film’s hero, Ashwath Marimuthu’s writing is the superhero.
