“Patriot Review: Hindu Villains, Minority Heroes, And A Disaster Of A Film”, The Commune, June 11, 2026

“Somewhere in the grand tradition of Malayalam cinema – the industry that gave the world Drishyam, Kumbalangi Nights, and Vaazha, someone greenlit Patriot. Someone looked at Mammootty, Mohanlal, Fahadh Faasil, and Rajiv Menon, assembled what can be called the Mount Rushmore of South Indian cinema, handed them a script apparently written during a power cut, and produced something that drags like a broken escalator going uphill.

Let’s begin with the names, because the writing room clearly exhausted itself there and called it a day. Our heroes? Daniel James, the scientist, and Rahim Naik, the army martyr. Patriots, you see – diverse, secular, capital-P Patriotic. Our villains? Sundaram and Shakti Sundaram. The subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The film doesn’t trust you to identify the antagonists through, say, characterisation, so it stamps their moral alignment directly onto their birth certificates using the time-honoured tradition of giving Hindu names to anti-nationals. Groundbreaking cinema. Truly fearless storytelling……”

Read full article at thecommunemag.com