Meesaya Murukku 2 Review: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Meesaya Murukku 2 has a genuinely important story to tell about gaana music and the caste and class barriers surrounding it, but flat writing and a painfully late central conflict keep it from landing the impact it clearly wants.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Genre: Musical Drama
Director: Hiphop Tamizha Adhi
Cast: Hiphop Tamizha Adhi, Karunas, Baba Baskar, Chaitra J. Achar
Meesaya Murukku arrived back in 2017 and remains the kind of film that still genuinely motivates young viewers today. A coming-of-age musical that also doubled as Hiphop Tamizha Adhi’s own biography, it connected with audiences in a way few films of its kind manage.
Eight years later, Meesaya Murukku 2 arrives as a spiritual sequel, shifting focus to gaana music, an art form often tied to a specific era and community, and how it has repeatedly struggled to earn mainstream recognition.
The film follows three generations of musicians. Das, played by both Hiphop Adhi and Karunas, is a popular gaana singer from Royapuram determined to bring the art form into the mainstream, supported by his wife Lakshmi.
His son Tiger Siva, also played by Adhi and Baba Baskar in different timelines, is an equally talented musician still searching for a stage worthy of his talent, backed by his wife Vaani, who comes from a Brahmin household but firmly believes every art form deserves equal recognition.
Jump forward to 2026, and we meet Jeeva, also played by Adhi, a DJ waiting for his own big break. Across all three generations, the same pattern repeats itself; none of these gifted musicians manage to truly break through into the mainstream.
On paper, Meesaya Murukku 2 has a genuinely compelling premise. The conversation about gaana deserving a proper stage remains relevant even today, and the film does a reasonably good job showing how Brahmin musicians have historically dominated sabhas and auditoriums, shutting out other art forms without much hesitation. The world of gaana itself is portrayed as vibrant and full of life, which makes the missed opportunity here even more frustrating.
The problem lies squarely in execution. Rather than weaving caste discrimination and class divide organically into scenes and character interactions, director Hiphop Adhi leans heavily on monologue after monologue to make his point, which drains the film of the natural tension it should have.
Even more frustrating is the pacing, since the film does not actually arrive at its central conflict until just ten minutes before intermission.
Despite being promoted as a musical, the songs here rarely push the story forward in any meaningful way, and much of the early runtime instead gets spent on an underdeveloped romance between Jeeva and Laila, played by Ketika Sharma, that never really goes anywhere.
There is also a genuinely disappointing sequence that mocks people from the LGBTQ community. While Jeeva later delivers a line about equality, that message rings hollow after the film has already used the community as a punchline moments earlier.
The film does work better in its more self-aware moments. Several quirky one-liners and small Easter eggs connecting back to the first film land nicely, and Harshath Khan’s comic timing, particularly in a sequence referencing the film Thug Life, genuinely got laughs in the theatre. Adhi’s decision to play all three generations of musicians himself, while also having Karunas and Baba Baskar step into those same roles at different points, is a genuinely interesting creative choice that adds some texture to the storytelling.
Ultimately, though, the film’s biggest failure is how late it introduces its actual conflict, leaving very little runtime to properly explore the deeper politics surrounding gaana as an art form. Meesaya Murukku 2 raises a conversation about caste, class, and artistic recognition that is genuinely worth having, but it never quite follows through on it.
The film clearly has the right instincts, yet flat writing, a slow start, and an overreliance on speeches keep it from making the impact it so clearly wants to. For a film centered on an art form fighting to find its voice in the mainstream, it is more than a little ironic that Meesaya Murukku 2 struggles to find its own.
If true crime dramas or folklore horror are more your speed this week, our review of Unabomber and our review of The Vvaan are both worth checking out too.