In Sirai aka Prison, Kathiravan (Vikram Prabhu) is a policeman involved with the escort of prisoners in transit. These escort cops must often rely on public transport, and during the entire journey they are responsible for keeping the prisoner confined and the public safe. At the beginning, Kathir is shown to open fire in a public place to stop an escaping convict. He is placed under enquiry. In the meantime, he takes on another escort job, of an under-trial Muslim boy called Abdul Rauf (a stunning LK Akshay Kumar, who reminds me of a young Basil Joseph).
Kathir's two teammates in the mission treat it more like an outing where they can drink and make merry. When they are caught in a public scuffle after one such carouse, Abdul is unsupervised in the bus. It gets worse: Even the rifle meant for guarding the prisoner is left behind with him. The cops chase after and catch up with the bus, only to find both Abdul and the rifle missing. It is at this cliffhanger moment that the intermission comes.
Sirai's second half deals with Kathir and his team meeting again with Abdul, and learning the circumstances that led to his incarceration. It is not a novel story; 70's and 80's mainstream Indian cinema was rife with narratives where an upright cop finds sympathy for a law-offender and they ultimately team up against the actual bad guys.But within this archetype, Sirai imbues its characters and situations with sufficient substance for them to engage the audience.
Abdul's situation comes about as a consequence of the communal divide in his village, and the opposition to his transgressive romance with the Hindu girl Kalai (Anishma Anilkumar). Supporting characters like Abdul's mother (Remya Suresh) and Kathir's wife (Ananta Thambiraja) show a welcome fire instead of being the stereotype doormats. I also loved that the Sirai did not feel obliged to have a climactic showdown reinforcing the cop's badasserie. This is a refreshing change from the ultra-macho 'my beard/dick biggest' leanings of today's masses-oriented cinema.
Of course, all is not great here. The second half of Sirai leans hard into sentimentality - sometimes to the point of obvious manipulation - with repetitive scenes of characters being oppressed or bursting into tears. Also, the visual grammar becomes unnecessarily jerky, insisting on cross-cutting flashbacks where a few lines of dialog would have sufficed to convey the information. It is as if the makers felt that the audience constantly needs to be shown stuff happening. But there is enough goodness here that flaws notwithstanding, Sirai is an excellent example of what I wish more mainstream cinema would aim for.
PS: The film is also an example of how using people born within the industry does not in itself constitute nepotism. Vikram Prabhu comes from an acting family that includes father Prabhu and grandfather the late Sivaji Ganesan. LK Akshay Kumar is the son of the film's producer SS Lalit Kumar. But both are so well-suited for their parts that you do not see them as privileged insiders denying more deserving candidates.
In terms of plot, Dhanush's Raayan (which he has directed himself) is a fairly standard mainstream action movie. A B&W prologue establishes that the lead character Kathavaraayan aka Raayan, after the disappearance of his parents, becomes responsible for his younger siblings - two boys and an infant girl - and will go to any lengths to protect them.
The boy grows up to be Dhanush, who runs a food stall and conceals his toughness under a meek exterior (but he still has a reputation for being a badass). His brothers Muthuvel and Manickavel (Sundeep Kishan and Kalidas Jayaram) are more reckless and frequently get into scrapes. The sister Durga (Dushara Vijayan) is the apple of Raayan's eye, and he is closer to her than the brothers. They have a father-figure in Sekhar (Selvaraghavan) who'd helped Raayan out after he escaped from his village as a child with his siblings.
The main plot is driven by a devious police commissioner (Prakash Raj, stereotyped but effective) that engineers a quarrel between local dons Durai and Sethu (Saravanan and SJ Suryah) with the idea of eliminating them both. One of Dhanush's brothers gets somehow implicated in this quarrel. To protect the family, especially the sister scheduled to be married, Dhanush has to kill one of the dons. This sets into motion a second set of events, one that tears the family apart, and ignites a trail of bloody vengeance.
Raayan's script is a mixed bag: on one hand it's filled with the usual cliches and eye-rolling contrivances of a star-driven film, but on the other, it explores nuances not normally seen in mainstream masala. The dynamics between the brothers, and the transformation of the hitherto pampered sister into an avenging angel justifying her name infuses freshness into the stereotypes - Dushara Vijayan in the film's second half is a revelation - the scene where Durga fends off an attack by goons on a mortally wounded Raayan is nail-biting, and she becomes the main driving force of the vendetta. One applauds Dhanush for permitting her to overshadow his own character. Even the shading of the bad guys is interesting - there's some wicked humor courtesy Suryah's Sethu getting buffeted between his two wives.
There is also some serious visual chutzpah on display, especially in the action scenes and the choreographed festive number that comes late in the film. Om Prakash's cinematography uses overhead tracking shots, slow motion and colors in spectacular ways. If Raayan's script had lesser concessions to 'mass' pandering this could have been an amazing masala movie. But it still has several moments of interest, per se.
Lokesh Kanagaraj's 'Thalapathy'Vijay-starrer Leo is basically A History of Violence(AHoV)...for Dummies.
In David Cronenberg's 2005 movie, Viggo Mortensen played amiable small-town restauranter and family man Tom Stall, who suddenly displays a ruthless streak taking down murderous thugs that invade his diner. Hailed as a local hero for his bravery, mild-mannered Tom's life gets complicated when a vicious gangster (Ed Harris with a scarred eye) drops in claiming that Tom is actually Joey Cusack, hitman for a crime syndicate. The gangster doesn't believe Tom's denials and stalks his family to pressure him into confession, even kidnapping Tom's son, which culminates in another bloodbath. The violence creates estrangement and strife in Tom's personal life. One day he gets a call from a man claiming to be Joey's brother, a big city criminal who wants Joey to return, threatening that he will otherwise come out to find him.
Kanagaraj lifts the premise almost wholesale: When crazed criminals invade Parthiban (Vijay)'s snazzy coffee shop in Theog, Himachal and threaten evil tidings to his little girl, he guns them down unhesitatingly and with superhuman accuracy. Shortly after, the kin of the slain gangsters who come in for revenge get slaughtered by Parthiban in a market brawl, making his wife (Trisha) wonder about the man she married. Then a gnarly old gangster Antony Das (Sanjay Dutt) drops in, insisting that Parthiban is actually his son Leo, a killer. Das also kidnaps Parthiban's son to make him admit his identity. Sounds familiar?
AHoVhas a reputation as a masterful study of inner violence, but I couldn't buy into it. Compared to previous Cronenberg ventures like Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and Crash, AHoV's layering is juvenile pop-psychology. The bad guys who come in after Tom/Joey, including his brother (William Hurt) are such flat caricatures there's no sense of the uncontrollable animal inside Tom.
But if I felt that way about the source film, Leo takes it down several notches, using the plot as yet another star-glorifying vehicle, albeit a frequently stylish one. In AHoV, till the diner assault, Tom is seen only as the sweet-natured whitebread townie. In Vijay's introductory scene he tackles an aggressive runaway hyena, even giving gyaan about animal behavior to the local forest ranger (Gautham Menon in another paycheck part), finally jabbing a tranquilizer by hand into the animal.
This is before we get the tour of him waltzing through the coffee shop to the strains of an English song called Ordinary Person, telling us how utterly "ordinary" this guy is. Yeah, right. Later on, we have more "Now feeling" songs like I'm Scared and Badass; because Thalapathy can't act his way out of a paper bag, he needs this Greek chorus equivalent to explain what his character is going through at each stage. When the fracas with the coffee shop invaders happens, it is set to retro jukebox Tamil tunes, softening the impact of the violence, making it more a flashy "hero" fight. To Kanagaraj's credit he does give these baddies a neat little backstory of how they landed in the cafe. After gunning down the felons, Vijay expresses his character's horror at his own violence by yelling aloud, in a hilarious imitation of Kamalahaasan's Guna histrionics.
As Antony Das, Sanjay Dutt regurgitates the "heavy" he played in the Agneepath remake and KGF: Chapter 2. Das runs a front of a tobacco business, and to emphasize this point the characters in this movie smoke like chimneys (Thankfully, Netflix doesn't bother with the mandatory on-screen smoking disclaimers). But the real business for Antony and his brother Harold(!) - played by Arjun Sarja - is drugs. Even here Kanagaraj shows his weird tastes by having the brothers deal in datura, a poisonous plant. Datura extracts have psychoactive properties, but they are not the "feel good" variety of drugs, used more as ritual poisons / fear-generating hallucinogens. When in an extended flashback sequence that also bungs in a "mass" number, you are told Antony Das' motive to track down Leo, you start to wish you had some datura toxin to swallow.
Leo's screenplay is a trainwreck of dead-ends and pointless twists. As depicted here, the character's dual nature is not particularly different from films like Hum and Baasha where an apparently mild-mannered protagonist is revealed to have a violent history he is covering up. The near 3-hour runtime is such a slog I had to split my viewing into 3 instalments. But it does have some of Kanagaraj's best directed action sequences. The highlight for me is a chase sequence where Parthiban, riding shotgun on a bike, chases after a convoy of vehicles driven by Antony's gang who have kidnapped his son. It features that same brand of painstakingly storyboarded and executed action that distinguished his 2019 Kaithi. The camera is an active participant in the proceedings, swooping back and forth, even going through vehicles. It's (ha!) fast and furious, yet maintains clarity in the sequence of events. Leo is probably also the hardest that Vijay has worked on a film in recent years, physically at least. In contrast to turds like Sarkar, where he just waltzes through the fight scenes while bad guys fall all around him, he is shown to have tougher battles, often taking a fair pounding before he finally prevails. If you do decide to subject yourself to the film, these might be small saving graces.
I'm probably shooting myself in the foot by saying this, but Baradwaj Rangan's review of Thiruchitrambalamgives a rather good analysis of what works and what doesn't in this 2022 Dhanush vehicle. With a piece that comes more than a year after the film's theatrical release (and a couple of months after it started streaming on Prime), I suppose I am rather late to the party. But then the film itself is drawn in good measure from Hrishikesh Mukherjee's cinema as well as the 90's Hollywood rom-com.
The Thiruchitrambalam of the title is the embarrassingly archaic name given to the characters of both Dhanush and his grandfather (played by director-actor Bharatiraaja, who in his heyday was known for his rural dramas and remarkable crime thrillers). Of course, almost no one calls them by this appellation. Instead, both are commonly addressed as 'pazham' (literally fruit, roughly translating as simpleton). It is a simplification that to some extent also defines how the world sees them.
Thiru Jr makes deliveries for a food aggregator app, while the retired grandfather takes care of the house. The third member of their home is the father (Prakashraj), a police inspector. At the beginning of the film, against visuals of an automobile accident, Thiru Jr monologues about how life is like a piece of glass even a single crack can destroy. The crack is reflected in the broken relationship between son and father. At home they either completely ignore each other or bicker using the grandfather as a go-between. In the first scene we see them together, the inspector father slaps Thiru Jr at the police station when he is taken there after having being dragged into a scuffle.
That's the other trait for Dhanush's character. Far from the archetype South Indian 'Mass' hero, he runs away from the mere whiff of confrontation (except his verbal spats with dad). His profession also becomes a source of awkwardness when he has to deliver meals at the homes of former college-mates, including the girl he had a crush on (Raashii Khanna). If Thiru Jr has any feeling of freedom, it is in the company of his neighbor and 3:00 am buddy Shobhana (Nithya Menen). As Rangan's review points out, Shobhana is in many ways Thiru's polar opposite. Where he is pessimistic and withdrawn, she is a bubbly go-getter. She lends Thiru a sympathetic ear and backs him up when he doubts himself, but is also brave enough to laugh at his confusions while giving him pragmatic advice. Given this is a mainstream romantic drama, one can see where this leads, but the writing and the chemistry between Dhanush and Nithya keep the journey interesting.
One way TCB deviates from the rom-com template is by allotting sufficient breathing space to the drama in Thiru's family. The animosity between father and son is not reduced to cute standoffs - When towards the interval point the father suffers a major health calamity, for a long time it is Thiru Sr who must serve his son's needs because the grandson cannot find it in himself to tend to the man he has thus far hated. Which is not to say that their lives are wholly grim. The vibe between the grandfather and the grandson remains a warm and humorous one. They share pints and opinions; Thiru Sr serves a similar function as Shobhana in the narrative: he's a sounding board, life coach and motivational speaker to his grandson; he even doles out love-life advice.
The little details, the dedication to keeping a low-key approach is where TCB shines. Where other films would make a huge do about the reconciliation of father and son, where the son getting over his timidity would be an extravagant 'HERO' moment with slow-motion, wire-work and guitar-driven BGM, the scenes here play out with a minimum of directorial fuss, and the characters remain within their skins. As writer and director, Mithran Jawahar deserves kudos for not stooping to incorporate the star mannerisms Dhanush employs in his 'mass' films.
Of course, there are flaws in the bigger picture. Rashii Khanna as a former classmate calls Thiru a topper that abruptly disappeared after college. Surely if you are in the same city, it can't be that hard to track a classmate, and even in the pre-smartphone days, news of family tragedies did travel. While class consciousness is a continuing sickness in our society, the way in which Thiru Jr's classmates openly jeer at his lowly occupation in public is a cheap way to garner sympathy for his character. The most significant "Tchah!" moment for me was late in the narrative when Shobhana is suddenly revealed to have been infatuated with Thiru right from their schooldays, as her brother claims, when he scatters a boxful of unsent Valentine's Day cards from her. It reduced her from the pragmatic, supportive friend to a stereotype wallflower from a more primitive age of Indian cinema. Thankfully it doesn't entirely take away from the charms of the film, which remains watchable.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that TCB was one of Tamil cinema's big hits for 2022. That this breezy low-key character drama managed to stand well amidst the din of the adi-thadi (biff-pow) Ajith, Vijay and Kamal starrers is a heartening trend.
Caste identity and discrimination has been the backbone of most of Mari Selvaraj's filmography thus far - those that haven't seen them, I heartily commend Baradwaj Rangan's reviews of Pariyerum Perumal (2018) and Karnan (2021). Pariyerum... told the non-fluffy story of a romance that transgressed caste norms and the fallout that occurred in its wake. Karnan, in which Dhanush plays the Angry Young Man from an outcast community, can plot-wise be regarded as a "Hero stands up for the oppressed masses" potboiler, but the script and direction gave it a distinctive identity - for me it was one of the best films of 2021. With his latest, Maamannan, Mari leans towards the commercial angle in his telling. This has the consequence of making the narrative more mundane than his previous ventures, but it is still quite acceptable as a mainstream movie told from the POV of the oppressed class.
As the title character, Tamil cinema's favorite 90's crass comedian Vadivelu gets a rare serious role, and he plays with obvious relish. His Maamannan is the respected leader - an MLA - from the scheduled-caste community, courted by the state ruling party for his ability to garner public support. Maamannan is admired all around him...that is, all except his son Athiveeran (Udhayanidhi Stalin). A la Ramesh Sippy's Shakti, there is between father and son a coldness, a wall of silence, whose reasons are couched in an incident from the past. There is also a marked difference in their attitudes. While Mamannan works for the upliftment of his people, there is still a core of servility in him: he accepts his rise in the political world as a gift given him by his upper-caste masters and at political meetings stands with folded arms, ready to receive instruction. Athiveeran, who runs a martial arts school, is more militant, preferring to demand and, when required, snatch by force his rights from the privileged. As a proud symbol of his caste origins, he rears pigs, and has a pig tattoo on his hand. He even paints pictures of pigs with wings, a symbol of the liberation he hopes for his community.
The third major player is Rathnavel (Fahadh Faasil), the rowdy upper-caste politico who treats Mamannan like a family serf. Rathnavel's character screams 'Bad Man' - when his prized hound fails in the local dog race, he beats the poor pooch to death. His cruel and domineering attitude eventually brings him in conflict with Athiveeran and later Mamannan. Pushed against the wall, it is up to Mamannan, whether to crumble and bow down to his masters' wishes or grow a spine and stand up against them regardless of cost.
Mamannan is a masala film, but within that space it tries to stand out. While there are fight scenes where Athiveeran shows his ability to beat up dozens of goons, the film does not devolve into a brainless machismo action fest. Female lead Keerthi Suresh is not the usual birdbrained damsel in distress - she has both the courage and the wits to be an equal companion to Athiveeran's fight for equality.
There are a few caveats, of course. Apart from Stalin being some 20 years older than the role he plays, the utter lack of nuance in Faasil's villain is a letdown. The screenplay could have done with some serious tightening - the lengthy stretch where Maamannan fights a guerrilla poll war against Rathnavel is mostly uninvolving. This notwithstanding, I found Maamannan more palatable than 2021's hyped Jai Bhim which reduced the lower castes to faceless victims dependent on being rescued by benevolent upper-caste heroes. Like Karnan, this movie at least exhorts the oppressed to stand up for themselves instead of looking for external saviors, and that's a sentiment I approve of.
What is interesting is the different approach of the makers. Theeran... is certainly the more ostentatious, with a clear focus on being a action-packed star vehicle. Even as part of a team investigating the case lead actor Karthi's character of Theeran is given the haloed treatment. A significant chunk of the film's runtime is squandered on a cloying romance track and there is even an 'item' song in the criminals' lair. The brutal and murderous crimes associated with the Bawaria gang allowed Theeran
to take a sensationalistic approach in depicting them, even using
stylized animation to make palatable the bloody history of those
dacoits. They are imbued with animal shades, imitating the actions
of a wolf pack on the hunt. The hero undergoes emotional violence when
his beloved wife is savagely assailed by the gang; this adds a deeply
personal revenge motive for his subsequent actions. The police team's attempt to capture the dacoits (captained by a ferocious Abhimanyu Singh) lead to an explosive night-time shootout that goes all out on the thrills.
Theeran Adhigaram Ondru is currently streaming in India on Prime and Hotstar.
In contrast, KS is tamped down to a fault, almost. Asif Ali as the inspector heading the investigation is the nominal lead, but he is not significantly marked out from the rest of the ensemble cast. In burdening the audience with the minutiae of the investigation - like the extended portion where they are tracking mobile phone locations - Ravi seems to be not only interested in conveying details of procedure, but also the soul grinding nature of the policeman's job. Hardcore fans of CSI style narratives may find this preoccupation with the mundane thrilling; others might feel that the film steps a little over the line between expressing the tedium of the characters' lives and transferring some of it to the audience. The criminals here are not like Theeran's heinous demons. Poverty and false promises from local politicians have driven the villagers to robbery and smuggling, the local law authorities state as matter-of-fact. They stand together as a defense against outsiders including the law - The film's most memorable scene at least for me was where Asif Ali's team walks through the maze of village lanes at mid-day to find it deserted of all the men; when they turn back the women form a posse and drive them out. But at the same time, they are not vicious cop killers.
On paper, KS's dedication to being a true-to-reality crime procedural sounds great, but what it jettisons in terms of drama is not sufficiently made up for in the treatment (film writer Aswathy Gopalakrishnan, whose reviews I respect a good deal is more enthusiastic). The characters are sketchy one-note cliches - Asif Ali has a guilt complex over shooting dead a student rioter, Alencier Lopez is the benevolent sub-inspector on the verge of retirement doling out parental advice, Sunny Wayne the cocky constable who predictably commits a blunder at a critical point in the film. The villagers harboring the criminals have almost no personality. Apart from the aforementioned scene of them being driven out by the women, there is little tension built in the execution, and I did not feel sufficiently attached to the main cast members to worry about the success of their mission. KS remains eminently watchable, just not memorable.
Kuttavum Shikshayum is currently streaming in India on Netflix.
For Movie with Mum night last weekend, I picked a title a friend had heartily recommended as a simple, very clean and wholesome entertainer - Saivam aka Vegetarian (2014). My favorite Indian movie critic Baradwaj Rangan also gave it a 'crowing' review. The friend was partly right about the movie - it was simple, clean and wholesome. Entertainer? Well...
Veteran actor Nassar is Kathiresan, the agrarian patriarch of a multi-generational family spread across the map. The members only meet up at the ancestral home during festivals or other important occasions, so as they roll in one by one, Kathir is overjoyed at the prospect of seeing the whole brood together again. He is a strict (but just) patriarch the rest of the family slightly fears. The punishment for any transgression of rules seems to be "Murga ban jao" (roughly "make a rooster pose", a common form of non-corporeal punishment for young children in India). This choice of punishment has greater resonance in the narrative that follows, but I suspect that in this family, even armed assault or murder could be forgiven after a "murga" penitence.
Kathir's grandchild from the son that lives with him is Tamizhselvi (Sara Arjun, who exudes so much goody-goody cuteness, diabetic viewers are in danger of going into a coma). On the other hand his grandson from a Dubai-settled daughter (Ray Paul) is a total arsehole. I was wondering if this was going to be a "Desi upbringing = good kids, urban upbringing = brats" homily, but thankfully there are other urban characters not like this brat. As to why he was pampered to be such a dick can probably be explained by the very Indian tendency to deify sons over daughters.
Saivam tries to generate a good deal of humor in the interaction between the rural and urban members. When the brat asks about wi-fi in the house, the family servant (actor George Maryan channeling his inner Goundamani) points to the various Wai-fu's (wives) in the family; that not satisfying the brat, he offers to go to the market immediately "to purchase some wi-fi for the young master". There's also the track of adolescent Senthil (Luthfudeen, in real life Nassar's son) who has a crush on his cousin (Twara Desai), but finds himself stymied every chance he tries to get her alone. Meanwhile his own younger brother gets to smooth-talk with the girl (and hilariously name drops Abhishek and Aishwarya as an example of 'older woman' couples).
Most importantly there's the murga aka rooster. He's called Paapa (meaning, baby). All the farm animals in that house have names. The irony is that the family is heartily non-vegetarian. Tamizh is very attached to Paapa, and the affection seems mutual; early scenes show Paapa repeatedly scampering off to her school. So when some ill omens remind Kathir that Paapa had been originally promised as a sacrifice to the village deity, Tamizh resolves to save her fowl friend from the family by means fair or foul. What happens next forms the rest of the movie.
Saivam has the bones of a cliched but pleasant family experience. The bare script is fine and the casting is quite good - I appreciate that they have actual adolescent actors and not obvious adults dressing in "college fashion". But the treatment is too broad. Tamizh is so angelic and self-sacrificing it never rings true. For instance she hides her bruises so as to not worry her grandparents, and at one point calls a childless aunt as "Amma" (mother) to help her dodge an embarrassing situation, which little kid does that? Conversely, the a-hole grandkid is an unmitigated brat, with no other dimensions or plot arc. A multi-threaded converging sequence in the middle where the family goes out in groups to hunt for the missing rooster has a very solid build-up, but ends up an overlong noise-fest.
A narrative of this intimate scope needs to get the micro-details and textures absolutely right, because they are what give personality to a story of this type. Great examples of this are Kaaka Muttai or K.D. So while there were some very good individual moments, I did not find Saivam sufficiently immersive overall to give it a hearty thumbs up. YMMV.
Lokesh Kanagaraj’s 2019 adventure Kaithi (Prisoner), in which an ex-convict on the way to meet the daughter he hasn't seen for years is lassoed willy-nilly into rescuing a truckload of poisoned policemen while a battalion of armed thugs (hah!) assault a nearly empty police station, was an entertaining masala film. Despite its length it had focus and an organic build-up of scale. It made you empathize with the main characters so much even the exaggerations towards the end of the film could be taken in stride.
Vikram, while it has tenuous links to the former, is the other way round, so labored and top-heavy it is a disappointing follow-up. The natural flow and interlocking of scenes in Kaithi is replaced by a wobbly narrative struggling to do justice to the star lineup. It launches with full swagger, starting with a ‘mass’ song by ‘Ulaga Nayagan’ Kamalahaasan and then killing him off before the twist that everyone saw coming. There are very few Kamal scenes in which, unless you are a die-hard fan, he doesn’t come across as a twat (some, like the one where he is arguing his ideology are beyond insufferable).
As a drug lord happily popping his own pills with a gang composed entirely of family members, ‘Makkal Selvan’ Vijay Sethupati brings a certain wild energy and humor, but even he seems to be playing a set of Sethupati mannerisms than a consistent character. Fahad Faasil (no title for him yet) as a youngblood covert agent tracking Kamal is reduced to a mostly stereotype Dirty Harry mold. Truth be told, the lead performances are in the main a lot of posturing against obnoxious techno or guitar music. Don't even get me started on a much-hyped cameo appearance that's such rubbish, it made me want to punch the people that thought this was a good idea.
Believability has rarely been the strength of the masala genre, but the flow of the film did not carry me with enough verve to stop the questions coming to mind. Why do the foot soldiers of a multi-billion-rupee drug racket carry only kaththi-koduval (melee) weapons and basic shotguns that are easily neutralized by our heroes? How did Sethupati’s gang become the top drug mafia in the country while being gullible enough to let someone install several kilos of RDX across their entire lair, anyway?
Even the action, Kanagaraj’s strong point in Kaithi, has the same jerky quality as the writing - If a director can't raise tension in a scene where our hero must get past a legion of baddies without disturbing a baby with a weak heart, there are some serious issues in the execution. The lone exception is a bike and car chase sequence somewhere near the mid-point which doles out some thrilling night-time action. The brandishing of the big guns in the climax seems like a rehash of Kaithi's Gatling gun sequence; it's flashier and louder, but still delivers diminishing returns.
If anything, Vikram is proof that all this recent talk about Bollywood films failing compared to Southern ventures because people want "better content" is just BS. Put enough number of marquee names together, add a truckload of fan service, and you can still get away with it. If you want my advice, just watch Kaithi and chuck all this nonsense about a shared universe out the window.
It is, I suppose, a curse of the pan-India movie paradigm that even the titles must be generic for the sake of universality. So they either use proper nouns, words that mean the same across multiple Indian languages, or, as in the case of Eega wunderkid Rajamouli's latest project RRR, reduce the title to an acronym that expands differently in different tongues. That said, with RRR I wonder if the bulk of the audience is even bothered to be acquainted with the expanded forms in the different releases. It might as well be just an echo of the manly growls that permeate this picture.
And there are manly growls galore. Each of the film's two male leads - Ram Charan and NTR Jr - gets a massive introduction sequence in which they are established as forces of nature. Rajamouli distinguishes his heroes with fire and water motifs respectively, even announcing these in on-screen titles, just in case anyone in the audience missed the metaphor. The film drips with so much machismo, it was a missed marketing opportunity that they didn't have promotional 'mandles'.
While RRR is making waves both in India and outside for its exaggerated
action set-pieces and equally exaggerated bromance between the lead
stars, it is by no means a novel concept. Bollywood masala mogul Manmohan Desai's Mard in 1985 showcased Amitabh Bachchan and Dara Singh knocking the stuffing
out of British colonials with fisticuffs and the aid of a trained horse and
dog. RRR's bad people, Governor Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his wife (Alison Doody, the only woman in the film who makes an impact), would certainly be at home with the caricature British villains from Mard. Stevenson admonishes his troops for wasting expensive British-made bullets on lowly brown natives, while Doody complains about the lack of blood spurts in a public lashing. I imagine the spirit of Bob Christo would heartily approve of these doings. For some reason they're not mindful of a niece (Olivia Morris) that hangs about with said lowly brown natives and brings them for tea and dance dates to the gubernatorial palace.
Continuing with the Mard comparisons, RRR does not match up to that film's cheerful ludicrousness. Mard had cheesy S&M leather outfits, Mission Impossible type latex mask disguises, a baddie literally bleeding out starved Indian laborers while wearing a Hammer Dracula style hooded cape. But one really can't hope for that level of reckless imagination now.
As some measure of recompense, RRR boasts of a level of polish in the execution of its set-pieces that the technologically-slipshod-even-for-the-80's Mard could not claim. An applause-worthy level of detail is given to each of the film's action sequences, which are meticulously designed and painstakingly executed - Ram Charan fighting his way back and forth through a whole mob of protesters, him and NTR Jr forming a Goro-like fighting combo, the wild animal assault on the Governor's mansion. Right up to the ridiculously explosive climax, the film speaks purely in hyperbole. There are even some epic emotional moments like when NTR's character is getting whipped by Ram and breaks out into a patriotic song - say what you will, these guys put in their all.
But anytime the film moves away from them or the baddies, it stumbles massively. Alia Bhat barely registers as Ram's love interest, and Ajay Devgan as his father sucks the life out of every scene he is in, purely by being his Ajay Devgan self. Taking them out of the picture would have cut a fourth of the massive runtime and kept it fresher.
I certainly enjoyed individual portions of RRR, but Eega / Naan Ee / Eecha / Makkhi is still the one Rajamouli film I consider worth revisiting.
A dedication at the start of Thupparivaalan salutes Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and 'the mercurial' Jeremy Brett. But the detective hero of Mysskin's movie owes more to the rude arsehole of the Robert Downey Jr. interpretation. 'Action' star Vishal is Kaniyan Poongundran, the archaically named moody sleuth that 'rebels at stagnation' (in the hero introduction scene he stomps all over his book-lined apartment, petulantly demanding to be given a challenging case). He behaves like a perfect tyrant with almost everyone, but most notably his 'Watson' Manohar (Prasanna) who seems a loser with no life of his own.
Kaniyan takes up the case of a schoolboy whose family dog was murdered, but the matter quickly escalates to a more sinister degree, involving a gang of assassins-for-hire (including a near-unrecognizable Bhagyaraj) who come up with some truly outre ways of carrying out their hits. The plot is all over the place, but Mysskin's writing delivers some ingenious fun moments, like when the killers carry out a Rube Goldberg scheme of offing a target with the help of nitrous oxide aka laughing gas - this would not be out of place in a Denny O' Neil - Dick Giordano 70's era Batman comic (for some reason, all mentions of nitrous oxide are bleeped out in the soundtrack, as though they were threatened with legal action by the gas manufacturers). Kaniyan's incongruous golf cap and ascot - standing in, one supposes, for Holmes' deerstalker and pipe - and the throwaway references to Tamil pulp fiction detective Sankarlal and Stanley Kubrick raise chuckles as well.
Thupparivaalan becomes less interesting in the bigger picture. The villains bandy a generic ruthlessness (the leader takes a coffee break in the middle of chainsawing a corpse, whoop-de-whoop), the 'HERO' action scenes and location hopping chases lose the idiosyncratic touch (although one of them ends in a memorably crazy Seppuku sequence). Also, Kaniyan's treatment of the token romance (a simpering Anu Emmanuel) is risible. But even while commercial, this film has more of the Mysskin personality than his Mugamoodi and is a decent watch for fans.
My opinions of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee classic Anand have been conflicted. While the first time I was wholly in its thrall, laughing at the funny moments and bawling at the climax, I later harbored a growing resentment at the idea of a dying man devoting his remaining time to being an interfering dick in other people's lives, and playing the sympathy card because he's dying. At least Anand is the happy kind of dick (and that climax still works).
Orange Mittai's Kailasam (Vijay Sethupathi, who also co-wrote and produced) is a more difficult kettle of fish. In the beginning we see him as an opportunistic hypochondriac. He's lonely, and by default bitter and sarcastic to everyone around, but the moment he is given an inch of sympathy by the EMT nurse Sathya (Ramesh Thilak, thankfully in a better age of cinema than when he would have been reduced to Hero's Friend parts) he wants to butt into the guy's personal life.
Like the candy, Orange Mittai the movie promises to be a short sweet-tart experience. In actuality it's 100 min running time feels almost twice as long. And maybe it's just me, but I would question the judgement of any medical worker who chooses to ignore the call of his supervisor to reach an emergency site and remain as an emotional support to a whimsical, cranky old man who insists on stopping in the middle of the road to pull off a 'mass' dance routine (a scene that goes on for way too long). There are occasional poignant moments, like towards the end when Sathya hugs Kailasam after dropping him near his residence, and the latter reacts with stiff discomfort, like someone wanting affection but awkward when receiving it. But the film doesn't earn its demands of your attention (with its dumping of multiple epilogues, the editing is clumsy) and doesn't reward you with sufficient depth of character to make up for the annoyance caused by the assholery of the attention demanding old crank.
PS: Apart from Sethupathi and Thilak in the leads, the movie has a bunch of cameos from the Soodhu Kavvum cast.
The House Next Door aka Aval aka Gruham got a decent review from my favorite critic Baradwaj
Rangan. In retrospect, I wonder if the fact that he was pally with the
director and lead actor led to a softening of his otherwise sharp
critical reflexes. Rangan made a lot of the fact that the film is a
"pure" horror, not mixed with other potboiler elements. But apart from
the fact that there are no song elements and comedy tracks, it's not
particularly different from the standard Vikram Bhatt horror feature.
Siddharth
and Andrea Jeremiah are a very-much-in-love married couple who set up
home in a picturesque remote hillside (which must mean a really long
work commute for the husband who works in a state-of-the-art hospital
doing surgical "deep brain stimulation" procedures). They get a new set
of neighbors in Atul Kulkarni and his family which includes his second
wife and one daughter from each marriage. The elder daughter, who is
infatuated with Sid (causing justifiable irritation in his wife,
especially since Sid doesn't seem to be bothered to even politely tell
the kid to back off) starts to show weird behavior and there's talk
about evil spirits asking them to leave the house. Since she's a
depressed adolescent with step-mum issues (and of course reads horror
books) they first try to look for a conventional reason and after a
pseudo-exorcism (Prakash Belawadi, pleasantly restrained) goes
spectacularly wrong, they delve into the history of the house (hinted at
in the prologue). More stereotype horror movie wankery till the end.
THND
goes through a battery of tired horror movie stereotypes - stuff that
goes bump, someone walking past in the mirror, ghostly face at the
window, levitating furniture and stuff that gets hurled
around. There's little here that's fresh or, like with the entertaining
first installment of The Conjuring, done with enough energy to transcend
the cliche. The stray good scene, like when Sid must try to ignore
visions of ghosts while he's trying to do a delicate brain procedure,
provides too little relief. The screenplay is predictable to a fault and
while the camera captures some interesting colored lighting that harks
back to Dario Argento's Suspiria, the imagery (CG or otherwise) to
depict the ghosts is unimaginative. On the whole this Grudge is a
drudge.
Vettai's plot about two brothers, one timid and the other foolhardily
brave, was potentially interesting as masala entertainment. Madhavan as
the timid elder one becomes a police officer after he is goaded by rogue
sibling Arya, and gets posted in a town where lawlessness runs rife.
The brothers have an arrangement where Arya ass-kicks all the bad
elements and Madhavan gets credit for it. The entire basis of such
an arrangement is supposed to be the loving bond between them. This
is however sketchily conveyed, with Arya getting almost nothing from the
deal. Madhavan doesn't especially acknowledge him in private, and does
not even come to his defense when his haughty wife labels Arya a loafer
mooching off her "braveheart" husband.
The wife is played by Sameera Reddy, with Amala Paul as her sibling.
These two are introduced in song as a super-spunky pair who send suitors
packing because they don't settle for just anybody. Except, when Arya
comes with Madhavan's proposal, they don't even feel the need to meet
the actual man before accepting the proposal. Make up your mind ladies,
liberated or not? It's still interesting that the initial encounters are
between Arya and Sameera in a series of feuds that you think will set
them up as a romantic pair, but they end up as devar-bhabhi (siblings-in-law). The main
baddie is a dubbed Ashutosh Rana doing a stereotype tamil movie villain
role, 'nuff said. This guy is so thick-headed he makes Prakash Raj in
Wanted look like a genius.
While there are occasional thoughtful
touches and winking nods to popular Tamil cinema, the major problem with
Vettai as a movie is that for its butt-testing 2.5hr length there are no
surprises and no tension. Arya is so badass he can beat up dozens of
goons alone. At one point in the film, Madhavan's character undergoes a
transformation that with a quick training montage converts him into an
equal badass. Every encounter has a foregone conclusion, which makes the
film a chore to sit through.
AR Murugadoss' Sarkar is a masala puri that mixes elements from Shankar's Mudalvan / Nayak and Upendra's Super. Joseph Vijay aka 'Thalapathy' Vijay plays Sunder (apparently inspired by Pichai), a mega-bucks earning tech CEO known for swallowing up other companies when he's not strutting around a gaudy Las Vegas for a number called (I kid you not) CEO in the House. Sunder flies down to India in a private jet to vote in the elections. Apparently he does it every time, but someone forgot to give that memo to the local companies who, till his intention is announced on TV, are shitting bricks about whether they will be the next target of Mr. Acquisition. Anyhoo, swaggering in to the election booth, Sundar finds his vote has already been cast, and decides to take the Jallikattu by the horns.
This unveils the main social message of the film, awareness about Section 49p of the Conduct of Election rules which says that anyone who finds their vote has been illegally cast can demand to cast a ballot paper vote. Of course, like any self-respecting Tamil hero in the post-Shankar world, Sundar is not content with winning the right to cast his single vote; he provokes the public at large to submit similar petitions. As a result, the party celebrating its sweep of the polls finds that the administration has called for a re-election. This means war between Thalapathy and his politico enemies - P. Karuppiah and Radha Ravi in the best sneering tradition of Tamizh Padam villains - where he must go from merely claiming voting rights to setting up a virtual party of independent candidates to stand against the baddies. No prizes for guessing who wins.
Much speculation has been made about the part played by movies like Sarkar as a deliberate ploy by Vijay to pave the way for a future political career. The film works to promote him as an aggressive youth leader with a pulse on the people (one scene has him give the "I too have come from poverty" spiel). This is the first time I have seen a Vijay film in full, and this guy is basically a Rajinikant clone in terms of acting style and gestures. He is always two steps ahead of the bad guys, and takes on roomfuls of goons with barely a crease on his natty beige blazers. The fight scenes are boring, with random slow-motion, camera-shakes and freeze-frames, the bad guys flipping over if Thalapathy even looks in their general direction.
Keerthy Suresh plays a barely there romantic interest (more so, since we fast-forwarded the forced PT exercise duet songs), while Varalaxmi Sarathkumar has a little more presence as the steely daughter of his political opponent who masterminds many of their shady maneuvers (Her character's name of Komalavalli created a huge stir in TN, being the birth-name of J Jayalalitha). It is nice to see mainstream Indian film do a female antagonist that's not the femme fatale type. A pivotal scene where she and her father discuss political sacrifice warms the cockles. Beyond that, there's no nuance to her character (and someone hilariously described her expression as though she was constantly smelling something bad under her nose).
Sarkar is still better than most Murugadoss movies I've seen (Ghajini, 7 Aam Arivu), especially since it dispenses with his excruciating flashback trademark and keeps the soggy romance to a minimum. The script doesn't have too many diversions from the main plot line (even Yogi Babu's comic track is surprisingly restrained). But it never achieves the high of the Shankar blockbuster (nor the insanity of Upendra's film), and Vijay's Sundar is unlikely to engage the full sympathies of an audience outside of his (considerable) fanbase.
It's late at night. Our protagonist Aravind (director Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan himself) is sitting alone at his computer, Salman Khan mask covering his face and boxers at his ankles, indulging in a risque webcam chat with a masked woman. The woman insists on them both unmasking, and he obliges. Then Aravind's wife furiously bangs on the door, and he yells back about being busy servicing "US clients".
On the next occasion, he gets a chat invite from another female ID. When he signs in he finds himself face-to-face (so to speak) with a bald-headed man who for a long time only identifies himself as Yohan (Anand Sami, malevolently effective). Aravind tries to back off, but the bald stranger insists on speaking. What he wants is for Aravind to watch as he kills himself.
These are details best not gleaned from any article you read before watching the film, because the strength is in their unfolding before you. Suffice to say, our stranger nurses a deep festering grudge against Aravind and his like, the voyeuristic purveyors of online prurience.
Lens is a curious journey. On the one hand, Aravind is a not very sympathetic protagonist, at least virtually cheating on his wife and scared of facing the consequences. On the other, the manner in which Yohan psychologically ball-squeezes him can induce squirms in many of us, depending on the extent of our specific online vices - whether we consume/share pornography, indulge in cybersex, or behave like those Bois Locker Room groups. The film in most part avoids being a generalist rant against online porn, choosing to address the question of which of these are in themselves crimes, who the victims are, and who the perpetrators are (and to what degree).
The way Lens is executed is not an unqualified success. The screenplay could have certainly been tighter. The scenes outside of the interaction between the two antagonists in their individual surroundings could have been done without. The expository backstory is conventional to the point of banality. Performances are adequate, rather than exceptional (Sami's Yohan is the best of the lot). But even with these mis-steps, it is an interesting experiment, which may be inspired by but does not ape previous films. It is also a warning that we have to constantly take stock of our weaknesses, and consider the cost, inadvertent or otherwise, that we and others have to pay to indulge them.
Petta is one of the best glamor shoots for its leading man Rajinikant. No really, after Mani Ratnam's Thalapathi as far back as 1991, this is probably the most beautiful looking 'Superstar' movie. Whether bathed in russet and amber glow, or cloaked in steel blue shadow, slightly out of focus like an emerging myth or sharp and up close like a sculpture in stone, the Rajini aura has almost never been so lovingly burnished. The legend himself, nattily dressed with mane-like coiffured hairpiece, looks relaxed and happy, a lion in his own jungle. Of course, Petta is far less ambitious than Thalapathi. In the erstwhile film Rajinikant played the Mahabharat inspired Surya / Karna, the iconic back-lighting as much in service of the character as of the star. Petta has no such thematic pretensions. The swanky production design (Suresh Selvarajan) and cinematographic lusciousness (S. Tirru) are for cosmetic effect (and what's wrong with that?). More crucially, Karthik 'Jigarthanda' Subbaraj's script is also purely in homage to the shrine of Rajini.
Using his iconic screen name 'Kaali', Rajini-saar swishes in as the new hostel warden of one of the strangest institutions: One with a cathedral sized assembly hall and a budget for candles that would make Sanjay Leela Bhansali proud, and prestigious enough to attract students from Australia, but where over-age thugs swagger the halls hazing newcomers, and the hostel idlis are hard enough to literally brain folks with. Kaali's entrance is equally strange - apparently his recommendation for the warden's post comes from the Prime Minister's secretary. When the true background of the character is revealed, one immediately wonders how he could have wrangled such a connection, but Petta's not a film for believable explanations. Kaali comes, he sees and he conquers - first the ragging thugs (led by Bobby Simha), then the corrupt mess contractor. While playing matchmaker to a young pair that came in from Australia, he meets cute with the girl's pranic healer mom (Simran, in real life near the age of Rajini's daughter, which here makes her an apt "mature romance" candidate).
A brilliantly shot "hero" action sequence with flashlights dancing in darkened corridors culminates in a dramatic reveal of Kaali's true purpose (with the expected drawn out flashback), and the introduction of new antagonists - Nawazuddin Siddiqui (dubbed) and Vijay Sethupati. The rest of the movie is about how Kaali takes the fight into the enemy's stronghold for the ultimate showdown, no prizes for guessing who wins. Some of the violence towards the end is unnecessarily gruesome (although not uncommon in the 80's potboilers Petta's roots lie in)
Petta is in the best and worst ways, a brand Rajini film: He talks, he walks, he dances, he nun-chucks, he everythings. There are numerous movie nods to both Rajini filmography and other references - Mullum Malarum's Raman aandalum Ravana aandalum, rival Kamalahaasan's Andhi mazhai, Ennio Morricone's TGTBTU theme also gets a hat-tip. No character other than 'baas' carries any real weight. Simha and Sethupati have sufficient talent to bring nuance to their parts (and to be fair, Subbaraj does strive to make them more than run of the mill henchmen), but I doubt they would have accepted the roles without the R-factor. Some interesting supporting actor / cameo choices for Tamil movie fans - veteran comedian YG Mahendran, actor-director M Sasikumar (Subramaniapuram) and J Mahendran (he directed Rajini in Mullum Malarum) The women (Simran, Trisha, Malavika Mohanan, Megha Akash) uniformly have "say your two lines and GTFO" appearances. Once the action begins they are pushed off-stage, not returning even for a "The End" frame. Baas' party is purely a Boys' affair, but those invited are guaranteed a good time.
It would seem these days that making a film with a single plot is no longer good enough. No, if there is one thing that Mr. Tarantino has taught us, it is that multiple stories must must twist around and crash into one another, especially if one wants to build a cult value around it. Perhaps I'm being unnecessarily critical here - Thiagarajan Kumararaja (let's call him TK for convenience) is certainly an ambitious maker. I haven't seen his previous Aaranya Kaandam (Incident in the Forest), but it carried a lot of word for style quotient, and given the significant degree of acclaim for Super Deluxe (SD) - resulting in a far more widespread release than the typical Tamil film, with English subtitles to boot - I was eager to check out the work of the new dog and his new tricks.
Initially the tone in all the episodes is lightly humorous, the sort of deadpan banter Tamil cinema does best. The boy's father turns out a transvestite (Vijay Sethupati, effective and immensely courageous), the porn film features the mother of one of the boys (Ramya Krishnan), unspooling its own set of spiraling consequences, the married woman and her cuckolded husband (Fahadh Faasil) having to work together to get rid of the body. But the seams are already beginning to show: the shifts between narratives are not always organic, and to my mind the film would have done better to snip one of the plot threads (the corpse cover-up episode in my view most of the time seems its own film).
As the film progresses further the differences grow more starkly. The transvestite father episode gets more emotionally intense (Myshkin-like?), the horny teens segment is still trying to generate laughs (Kumaraswamy?), while the neo-noir husband-wife-body part still seems like a forced appendage. It may seem here like I am saying that a film should have the same tone throughout. I can understand that generating a different feel for each thread can be its own special experiment, but I am saying that for me, it seemed like an exercise for the sake of, especially when the joints where they fuse become more unwieldy. The over-the-top sleazy cop who is so apt for the femme infidèle segment is too cartoonish for the transvestite thread. There is a scene where the transvestite confesses a shocking crime, one you imagine will never cease to haunt her, but the script feels obliged to give each of its branches a happy ending and in this one it just feels forced.
I also felt there was a significant element of soap-boxing. Characters give sermons about discrimination, social / religious hypocrisy, universal oneness in an obvious manner, and Fahadh's rants come across as director mouthpieces than something his character's mind would come up with. A great screenplay is not one that has worked out all its flaws, but one whose strengths keep you sufficiently engrossed to gloss over them. The contrivances that occurred in Soodhu Kavvum seemed a natural part of its zany universe. In SD, I was pulled out by logical inconsistencies and deus ex machina because I could not give over my suspension of disbelief to the material. There are some terrific individual scenes here (the transvestite's confession in the subway, the immediate aftermath of the kid learning that his mom was a porn actress, the sleazy cop terrorizing the couple) but I felt that TK should have better respected the material by with less of cramming events, shifting viewpoints and too-clever-by-half twists.
I must confess here that apart from a few references, like the Star Wars theme (on a nadaswaram), and some of the references made to older Tamil films, I did not have the background for a lot of the film's clever homages (a friend had to explain the context for the song Ennadi Meenatchi and that a henchman character's t-shirt said F.U.C.K. in Tamil).
Madcap caper comedy is a hard thing to pull off. You need a tightly paced script with good gags and actors with great timing...and you need to know where to stop; strain too hard and it falls apart. Unlike the often brilliant and even-in-its-most-indulgent-moments interesting Soodhu Kavvum, 2012's Kalakalapu (KK) is more a "what could have been" good movie than what is.
KK's story introduces us to Seenu (Vimal), a modest day-dreamer struggling to keep afloat a family heirloom restaurant. Each time the fellow thinks his luck has finally changed (he even gets excited at the prospect of a sit-in political protest near his hostelry, which promises thousands of hungry mouths), shit happens and he is in a bigger (ha!) soup than before. His creditors are constantly baying at the door, and even the woman he falls for at first sight (Anjali) turns out to be a food inspector who hands his restaurant a "shape up or shut down" notice. Just when Seenu feels life couldn't get more complicated, his brother Raghu (Shiva) is released from prison. An affable rogue and compulsive gambler, Raghu has no qualms about stealing what is not freely available. He finds his romantic succor in the cook's granddaughter (Oviya), this film's version of what critic Baradwaj Rangan cutely refers to as Tamil cinema's trademark loosu ponnu (bird-brain) heroine. In an ungainly way the script veers between Seenu's efforts to get the restaurant going, differences with Raghu, his love life troubles and the additional complications brought in by the Brownian back-and-forth of a mobile phone case hiding 10 crores worth of diamonds.
KK gets some things right, mainly in its casting. There are no 'superstar' / 'megastar' / 'ilaya thalapathi' names in the roll-call. The male leads Vimal and Shiva are credible middle-of-the-road hero types (no scuplted abs or slow-motion intro shots), and they have great chemistry with each other and the rest of the cast. Even when they are clearly disjointed items there is a lot of spark in the supporting roles: The creditor (Ilavarasu) forced to don a variety of disguises after he is fooled by Raghu into badmouthing the local inspector, the conked constable who becomes a showreel of famous cop impersonations from Tamil movies...of special mention is the modern day YG Mahendran avatar Santhanam as the puffed-up toughie rival to Seenu's affections for his girl. Especially in the second half there are some inspired crazy caper sequences.
But KK could have been a much better film if not for the script letdowns. Several plot lines are left as hanging threads. Not to say that
other characters are all well-rounded but the heroines are noticeably
underwritten, with more attention to their midriffs than their
personalities. The premise of Seenu's flame being a food inspector is only used to generate a spot of comic friction before being entirely dropped; she is later reduced to a hanger-on waiting to be rescued from a forced marriage. Raghu's loosu ponnu is defined more by her outfits than by the writing. Caper films like Soodhu Kavvum and Hindi cinema's 99 also had glam girls, but they were a more seamless part of the plot. The bit about reworking the restaurant as a traditional food joint is also dispensed with in a scene and a song. Santhanam is energetic, but he needed sharper and more substantial material to work with.
As a "movie night with mum" on Netflix however, Kalakalapu is decent entertainment with some chortle-inducing moments amidst the muddled filler.
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