GOAT was a highly anticipated release, marking Vijay's first movie after announcing his entry into politics. With his shift to full-time politics on the horizon (though he has one more film with Vinodh in the works), fans were eager to celebrate the star. The script had all the elements of a mass Vijay film—reused action sequences, dialogues, and dance moves, plenty of Easter eggs, and fourth-wall breaks from start to finish, making it more about Vijay than the character. However, the execution didn’t live up.
The movie has several issues, including subpar art, weak VFX, miscast actors, and an awkward flow of song-murder-song scenes. The biggest problem, however, is the length. At 179 minutes, the film feels unnecessarily dragged out, and would have benefited from tighter editing to bring it down to a manageable 150 minutes. (Maanadu was a crisp 147 minutes and packed with entertainment.) A 20% cut would have made this film 80% better.
On the casting front, the female characters were poorly written. While it was nice to see Sneha back on screen, Meenakshi Chaudhary was a disappointing choice.
