Tamil · Heist · Action · Comedy · 2h 26m · 2026

Sigma

6.0/10Hmm... there is a filmmaker here. The film is still looking for him. 🤔

Sigma knows how a heist movie should look. It hasn't yet learned how a heist movie should make us feel.

Being Vijay's son may bring Jason Sanjay's first film more attention than most debut directors receive. But once the lights go down, surname is irrelevant. The movie has to speak for itself.

Sigma speaks in two voices. One belongs to a young filmmaker who clearly likes cinema — scale, entrances, action blocks, camera movement, music and visual energy. The other belongs to a first-time director still learning that putting exciting things into a screenplay is not the same as making the screenplay exciting.

A heist film needs hunger. We should desperately want the hero to get the money. We should understand the plan, worry about what can destroy it and enjoy watching intelligence collide with danger. Sigma has plenty happening on paper, but I often saw the machinery before I felt the tension.

A good heist movie should make me ask, 'How are they going to pull this off?' Sigma too often made me ask, 'When are we actually getting to it?' That difference is where much of the film's problem sits.

I don't think the useful conclusion from Sigma is that Jason Sanjay cannot direct. There are enough moments here to suggest the opposite. He has visual instincts, he is comfortable mounting scale and some action portions carry energy. For a debut filmmaker, that confidence is encouraging.

But direction is not only about creating individual moments. It is also knowing which moments the movie does not need. It is rhythm. It is knowing when the audience already understands something. It is making characters matter before placing them in danger. That control is where Jason still needs considerable improvement.

Sundeep Kishan helps the film. He has enough ease to prevent Guru from disappearing underneath all the mechanics around him. But even a committed actor cannot manufacture emotional depth that the screenplay has not fully supplied.

The debt and the library connected to his mother's memory could have given the heist a stronger emotional heartbeat. If every questionable decision Guru made was measured against something deeply personal, then the money would mean more, the heist would mean more and winning would mean more than completing the plot.

Sigma keeps adding ingredients — gangsters, casino, drugs, money, vaults, secrets, romance, comedy, action and twists. But cinema is not improved simply by increasing the ingredient count. At some point the screenplay has to decide what its movie really is.

Familiarity itself is not the problem. We watch familiar love stories, revenge films and police dramas every year. Predictability becomes a problem only when the journey gives us nothing more interesting than the destination.

What I do appreciate is that Jason does not direct like somebody frightened by the size of his first opportunity. I would rather see a debut filmmaker attempt something ambitious and discover where his weaknesses are than make something completely anonymous.

His next film does not necessarily need to be bigger. It needs to be sharper — stronger screenplay development, more ruthless editing, deeper characters and more time asking why a scene exists instead of only whether the scene looks cool.

There is an irony in a movie surrounded by enormous amounts of money. Sigma has plenty of cinematic currency — scale, technical polish, a capable lead, music, action and ambition. It simply does not always know where to spend it.

So Sigma does not make me want to write Jason Sanjay off. It makes me curious about his second film. The first one has shown him the difference between imagining a movie, mounting a movie and making an audience emotionally travel through one.