Movie Review – Jailer

Where is Thalaivar heading to?

Ya ya, “Thalaivaru Nerantharam” and all is fine but what really it does apart from making a seventy year old man keep on walking in slow mo throughout the film. If slow mo is what I want I’d have rather watch Megan Fox in ‘Transformers 2’. Between ‘Jailer’ and ‘Leo’, probably the only two movies, which I thought, would’ve been nice if I had watched in theatre last year, I thought ‘Jailer’ would be better, because people were raving it. But apart from few moments which Rajini would make his own, no matter how crappy the director is, as a film ‘Jailer’ didn’t appeal. ‘Leo’ even though wasn’t great, at least had good filmmaking skills compared to this. What’s worse is even though I criticize, I enjoyed it while watching. That is dangerous.

Seeing Thalaivar in promos where he polishes his son’s shoes and gets ridiculed by his grandson, I thought the movie would have tried to create fake humility, but fortunately it was not the case. Nelson’s comic take worked. “Tiger” Muthuvel Pandian (Rajinikanth) is shown as a powerful man right from the word go, even when he is kidnapped when his son is on a mission. I must say, it was well handled. I expected, that for some time, he would play underdog and suddenly come to power but it was not the case. It might have worked better this way but would have been usual. Anyways the first part where he was not the ‘hero’ was only short lived and largely unappealing. There was not even an iota of sadness when we get to know that his son is killed. The director absolutely doesn’t give us any time to reminiscent.

Post that its usual Rajini template, only that there were three more people to walk in slow mo along with him. Even though monotonous, it all works due to the music and Rajini’s screen presence. But there is absolutely no creativity. Music is the same old, jarring, high octane pieces, which would last for the time being. One guy during some conversation casually said that Anirudh is a trending guy and not a trendsetter like Harris. There are complaints about Harris but that’s for another day. For now Anirudh’s music is working.

The crux of the story is nice, Nelson has packaged the story well with dark humor, the climax twist works, the villain is good, the cameos are good, even Tiger’s son Arjun (Vasanth Ravi) is good in whatever space he gets. I can get your mind voice, “ithuku mela vera ena da venum”. But altogether there was something missing. The film doesn’t feel coherent. Somehow Nelson and Rajini together sell this film. But we don’t get to feel for the events happening in the film. The highs are lows are ebbing. When Arjun dies, when the treasure is obtained, and all the main points in the film, we don’t feel the sadness or the elation, the characters feel. We just nod to what the actors say in that specific scene. But may be a lot many liked it because the emotion in the climax shot was brilliant, it hits the nail right on the head.

The trend of cameos are irritating. They just pull in people from different industry just for face value to sell it. We don’t get to know anything about them and absolutely no back story. We are applauding them for the stars they are and not for the role in the film. As it’s the beginning, it’s exciting but I’m sure it’s going to become a trend and soon become a cringe fest like Marvel Cinematic Universe. But I confess, the climax scene where they all light up the cigar together, I couldn’t sit in my seat out of excitement.

Movie Review – Beast

A decent thought process failed due to awful execution

A mall being hijacked is a new concept in Tamil Cinema, may be somewhat similar to ‘Payanam’. Just like ‘Doctor’ it felt like a quirky concept which Nelson could handle. I think even Nelson would have thought like that. But as much as he’d have enjoyed writing it, I guess he’d have not visualized it properly on how it must be made. Because the film didn’t look like uninterested film making but an unimagined film making. It felt like a script which was not planned properly on how to be executed and executed just with available resources. Is it worth taking a risk with such a big star is the question in contention?

The film opens with Vijay planning for an impossible operation single handedly as a RAW agent. It’s not a movie to question logic, that’s understandable but even for that standard, it was tied between making a total masala movie and an action movie. If it’s the former type, one could seamlessly enjoy the movie. When the director’s sensibilities come to fore and he tries to make a movie like the latter, that’s where problem occurs. Vijay’s quirks fairly works but just to be standing there against so many people in guns and shooting the guns with single hand, it doesn’t work for this movie. This could have been okay for a movie like ‘Bairavaa’ but showcasing as an intelligent movie, that was the biggest problem here.

With ‘Doctor’ being the only film, I’ve seen of Nelson, I had become a big fan of him. With Lokesh and Nelson being the trending directors currently. I love both their personality and originality, Lokesh’s seriousness and sincerity and Nelson’s humor, that comes second to none. He’s just an effervescent charm on television. He could make us watch a program just for him. When that kind of director makes a film like ‘Doctor’ I was amazed and happy. That’s my major inspiration for watching ‘Beast’ which I watched despite many people slamming it. Even though it wasn’t in the league of Worst Vijay movies like ‘Madhurey’, ‘Aathi’, it certainly wasn’t good. May be more boring, than bad. That’s why I was affected more. A boring Nelson film is unimaginable.

In ‘Doctor’ he used Sivakarthikeyan wisely. Even though I wasn’t satisfied with his acting, it was a welcome change and good for him. For me, the heroine’s character by Priyanka Mohan was top notch. Superbly done and perfectly acted. I thought the characters here would be like that. But instead of being like it, it was the same people who appeared as repat. Except for Vijay, Pooja Hegde and the new actors, the old actors were from the same universe or were exactly like that, which was irritating. These things when it works, it feels great, when it doesn’t, it’s such a bore. Vijay could have been better utilized for humor. I understand that Nelson doesn’t like traditional comedies to be performed by leads, even wry humor could have been done in a better way. Especially when you have an actor of Vijay’s caliber in the film.

Not sure whether the songs were just added for commercial purpose but he doesn’t make us feel that we missed something by not having songs in the film. Kudos for the that. The action sequences like the opening bit, interval sequence and especially the roller skater scene (worst of all) were the speed breakers of the movie. People who go out for smoking during songs would’ve done it for those sequences, that’s how bad it was. Plus, Vijay’s stoic face was not helping it. The shooting scene in the second half was a total disaster, it could have been made a lot better.

There were couple of interesting scenes. The opening balloon scene. I thought Nelson was going to break Vijay’s image by making him shoot despite the girl being there, but it didn’t happen, so it ended up being a traditional Vijayakanth type scene. But the tension till that point was good. Same was with the scene where he cuts the rope around his wrists. It was superbly handled.

It was quite a coincidence that Pooja Hegde acted in a Tamil movie when I was crushing on her badly. May be that’s one more reason or may be the main reason for me to watch the movie. Especially her wedding dance which I had watched in my soundless phone ‘n’ number of times. I had made a resolution that I’d watch it only along the movie and that I did. Like someone had commented, those few seconds were greater than the entire movie. She looked ravishing alright but didn’t really get a chance to perform or maybe couldn’t perform in the given chance. If there had been one scene which could have been added, she was in her tank top during the last fight but didn’t know when the costume changed. She could have given the shirt to Vijay after his shirt had got bloodied, it would have been a great touch and hot scene. Maybe they had done a scene where she removes shirt but edited it to time constraint, otherwise it wouldn’t have been made evident that she was wearing that tank top inside her shirt. They could have gone without editing it, it would have been a worthy scene to have had.