In the first few minutes of Singam 2, Duraisingam (Suriya), an undercover cop who is now an NSS teacher in a school, risks jeopardizing his cover to confront a local thug who insults the national song. More than just a hero-elevation moment, the scene adds drama and intrigue to Duraisingam’s personality. A similar moment occurs in Sai Dhanshika’s Yogi Da, in which police officer Yogeshwari loses her cool after an insult to the national flag. She resolves to make mincemeat of the henchmen. She does it rather stylishly, but to what end? We never truly know. Director Goutham Krishna is more concerned with creating whistle-worthy moments in each scene, but he falls well short of providing us with a character worth whistling for.

Yogi Da opens with Yogeshwari (Sai Dhanshika) raiding a wine shop in Coimbatore to apprehend an accused. Because the shop belonged to someone prominent, she was sent to Chennai. Her integrity stands in stark contrast to the atrocities of Jawahar Babu (Kabir Duhan Singh). The rest of the film is about her ability to say ‘Yogi Da’ practically every time after overcoming contrived barriers in her road to outsmart Babu.

To begin with the positives, Sai Dhanshika appears effortless while completing the stunts, which would be appropriate for any mainstream Tamil film starring our big heroes. Unfortunately, the benefits end there, and the film’s major flaw is that the plot revolves around showcasing her physical abilities, leaving her with nothing to work with as an actor. Similar to the contrivance of whistle-worthy moments, the film does not appear to be invested in the message it claims to convey. When a female officer (not the evil commissioner, but the protagonist) cries at her subordinates to ‘drape a saree’ because she is unable to apprehend the guilty, it does not advance the cause of women’s emancipation. While this is only one scene and one line, the terrible script that follows does not erase the impression it made.

Kabir Duhan Singh’s Jawahar Babu may have been a credible enemy if the writing had extended his brief brilliance. at a sequence supposed to remind us of Rajinikanth’s swag while smoking at his police station in Moondru Mugam, Jawahar, who keeps calling Yogi ‘pombala cop’ in condescending, warns her not to smoke since it will harm her uterus. This scene reveals Babu’s misogyny and his reductive view of women as child-producing machines. More work in these locations could have linked the conflict of ideas to the ordinary fist fights. But director Goutham Krishna, with his box-ticking women empowerment exercise, has little time for such intricacies.

If the filmmakers did not rush the story, the picture could still turn out to be an ordinary potboiler. Rather than focusing the narrative on a single major crime that results in a cat and mouse game between Jawahar and Yogi, we get broad strokes of Jawahar providing methamphetamine, philandering, and browbeating his opponents. None of these remain and stick. Many ideas should have been debated and implemented with more flare rather than simply adopting the first suggestion and running with it. Many of these sequences, such as Jawahar playing carrom