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Vishwanath & Sons deals with a red-flag subject, fronted by a protagonist who is a walking, talking green flag. Sanjay Vishwanath (Suriya), a multi-millionaire businessman and Olympic-medal-winning shooter, credits his father for teaching him all those valuable lessons. He becomes a skilled shooter after his father buys him a toy gun and when Sanjay hits his first target, his dad is overjoyed and claps.

“He never let me go off his lap the whole day, and I never let go of shooting,” Sanjay recounts in a TV interview. Sanjay is also a 40-year-old bachelor and he has his father to thank for that too.

Sins of the father

Mr Vijay Vishwanath (Rajiv Menon) cheated on his wife Nirmala (Radikaa Sarathkumar) with a model, Anjali (Raveena Tandon), who worked for his brand and eventually married her. When confronted by a pre-teen Sanjay, his father Vijay tells him that he had fallen out of love with his mother and developed feelings for Anjali. He adds that this is simply the nature of things and that Sanjay might end up doing the same as an adult. A young Sanjay scoffs and decides never to repeat the sins of his father — hence the well-accomplished bachelor we meet as an adult. But when his mother laments that the empire he’s built will have no heir, Sanjay finally relents… not to get himself a wife, but to have a child through surrogacy. But when the baby’s health issue calls for a bone-marrow transplant, guess who has to step in? Correct — the surrogate mom, Maddy (Mamitha Bijju).

The irreverent, foul-mouthed, vodka-slugging Maddy — a true Gen Z brat — ends up falling for the upright, chivalrous, kind-hearted Sanjay. But his promise to his father and a moral compass that keeps pointing at the age gap, becomes the conflict in a film where everything else is rosy and everyone brims with goodwill and love.

In the second half, we meet an elderly couple who believe they’ve been abandoned by their daughter, only to realise they’ve actually been cocooned by people she planted to make sure the two live out their days in a wonderland. In a sense, the whole film feels like a glossy mirage inhabited by people who are simply too good to be true.

On top of the walking, talking green flag that is Sanjay, we also have Mrs Nirmala, his mother. Radikaa overshadows the other actors in the character of the doting mother, who is a mix of dignity and easy-going affability. She might come across as a conservative, old-school mother, but she’s cool enough to joke about her son’s monthly travels abroad for his flings. Add to that Mamitha Bijju’s effervescent performance as the brat who wreaks havoc in Sanjay’s household and the film hardly has a dull moment till the interval.

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It’s Mamitha Bijju who keeps a sensitive subject — a romance between an older man and a much younger woman — from feeling quite so sensitive. She brings warmth and candidness to a role that’s essentially a ‘manic pixie dream girl’: a whimsical, eccentric female character who exists primarily to help a broody male protagonist grow or rediscover his zest for life. And that’s exactly the problem with the film too. While it makes the central conflict palatable, it strips away everything that would actually put such an age-disparate relationship under a moralistic lens in the first place. It shies away from the power dynamics, the differences in emotional investment, and the differing stages of life the two people are in — the very things that put such relationships on the receiving end of frowns barely register here.

Instead, it’s Maddy who comes across as the grown-up here, while Sanjay is the one unable to move past his trauma, clinging to an old promise.

And the plot does a make-over

And then, post-interval, it becomes a different movie altogether. Maddy takes a back seat as we watch Sanjay lay his other trauma to rest and it’s here that the film loses its initial appeal. Without this digression, Vishwanath & Sons could have been a far better film than it ends up being. The brilliant momentum built in the first half takes a sad dip and the audience is left with a strong sense of déjà vu from Varisu (2023) and Bhramotsavam (2016).

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The focus now shifts from the romance to Sanjay’s step-family and it is understandable that his trying to resolve the unfinished family story is a prerequisite for resolving the live conflict, but that barely registers on screen. Also, the childhood trauma of his father’s infidelity and its eventual healing through his conversation with his stepmother, doesn’t actually negate the age issue in his present-day life. Sanjay’s problem was never just about marrying Maddy — it was about marriage itself. Atluri, however, opts for a safe, ambiguous ending that lets him sidestep the tight spot. But in doing so, he robs Vishwanath & Sons of the chance to be more than what it ultimately is: an enjoyable romantic family drama.