Villu - Master of Deception

"What is common to all Vijay films?"

While the retard might answer "Vijay", the Insolent Imbecile would be quick to raise his hand and say, "Everything!" Before I lose my fuse and ramble on about the sheer talent required in captivating an audience with the same story, time and time again (a feat taken to unparalleled lengths by Dan Brown), we must return to terra firma and remind ourselves that there are only nine possible story plots and every tale ever told falls into one of these. (This claim was stretched to the breaking point by two movies recently - Aap Ka Surroor: The Movie The Real Luv Storry and Radio, but that is a topic for another day) How selfless is the actor then, who has pledged his life to enthralling the audience repeatedly over almost a decade with the most awesome of those nine story lines? [food for thought]

Right, now for the movie. From the rolling credits, as fantastic names like Rebel Ravi (Story - Dialogue) and Pepsi Vijayan (Stunts) flash past your wonderstruck eyes, you know that this is unlike all of the other awesome Vijay movies you might have narrowly avoided. Soon enough, we are thrust without warning into the midst of skirmish where a sari draped Vijay brings down enough goons to create the army of a small country for teasing an old lady. The fight ends in a song where Vijay advises us to respect our parents - an action thriller with a social message, something as rare as a brain cell on Dan Brown!


When the song ends, a few fast-paced scenes tell us that Vijay is working undercover for the cops. Again, the Skeptic might turn to us and ask the irrelevant question "Under what cover?" But Vijay, we learn the hard way, is one of those rare actors with unlimited charisma at his service and who can go undercover without any cover at all.

Enter the gorgeous Nayantara (now you might think you're seeing a pattern here in the blog entries, but I assure you it is only in your thoughts) who runs into Vijay at a wedding and after the requisite futile resistance, falls madly in love with him - for only the dead can resist Vijay's charms. Vijay once again treats us to an amazing fight where he again defeats the army of a small country. At this point, I had to pause to wear the sunglasses borrowed from my annoyed neighbor for the sheer awesomeness emanating from the screen was threatening to turn me into a schizophrenic with cataract. I unpaused only to realize that Vijay had ulterior motives in seducing Ms. Tara. He was too good for her anyway.

Enough villains to plot a coup d’état in a small country appear around the half time mark, the amazing Prakash Raj one among them. A few song and dance routines later, our hero lands in Munich where he begins a game of crafty manipulation that would have Sun Tzu roll over in his grave. As Vijay pits one villain against the other, the plot lashes out, slithering and sliding, like a pre pubescent black mamba caught in the jaws of a rabid mongoose. As if we could overlook the fact, a constant soundtrack keeps reminding us how awesome Vijay is.

For those who cannot stomach Vijay's gritty acting for longer stretches at a time, Vadivelu appears sporadically reprising the role in his last movie, whichever that might be. He has stuff ranging from glossy yellow ISO certified paint to nuclear warheads thrown at him and survives everything only to go head to head with a Tamil speaking cow in Munich! It is clear that the Watchowski brothers once again made use of time travel to steal Vadivelu's incredibly agile moves in this epic fight to incorporate them into their shabby 'The Matrix'.


Towards the end, Villu shifts genres from an Action Thriller to Revenge Blockbuster and we see that Vijay is in fact a bloodthirsty son hunting his father's killers. And guess who the father was - another Vijay! And this guy has HIS OWN BLOODY FRIGGING AWESOME SOUNDTRACK. As for how the movie ends, I must not spoil all the fun.


Keeping in track with Tamil movies of late, Villu uses advanced computer animation technologies that would put Tom and Jerry to shame. Also, the Digital Era Quotient of the movie has been upped with the villains having stored their secrets not in a floppy or a CD, but in a Blue Ray Disc. The words 'Blue Ray Disc' have more screen time that Nayantara and by now have been seared into the Tamil consciousness.

Overall, Villu is a fantabulastic movie - one that must be watched with the aid of sun glasses and quality sunscreen lotion and is well deserving of its ‘Master of Deception’ title. For hiding beneath the glossy surface embossed with the scantily clad Nayantara, is a gritty thriller about the Tamil criminal fraternity that has now spread to the farthest corners of the planet and is in possession of groundbreaking technology like the Blue Ray disc.

Aadhavan - Bullets, Babes And Bluetooth

I realized that my fortunes had taken a turn for the awesome when I chanced to see the insanely awesome movie Aadhavan. The movie revealed to me how far the Tamil Film Industry has progressed from bland movies like Kamal Haasan's Nayagan or Rajnikanth's style-without-substance flicks. In fact, Aadhavan is so full of substance that watching it more than once at a stretch can be termed substance abuse. Enough beating around the bush of awesomeness.

Aadhavan is the thrilling story of a master assassin named (you guessed it right!) Aadhavan, played by Suriya. The movie begins with our hero diving into a pool and firing a gun underwater to assassinate an unsuspecting saffron-clad holy man. As an astonished crowd looks on (jaw drops and shrieks all around), Aadhavan vanishes without so much trace as a stray bubble.

This unbelievably bombastic kill propels Aadhavan to international fame and as the credits roll by, we see the master assassin at work dispensing unwary targets all around the world using calibers of all variety, bazookas and even a sniper rifle, without so much as batting an eyelid. We see some minor product placement in action when Aadhavan takes a bite off an Apple, throws it over his shoulder and whirling around, shoots it in two.

Now comes the main story. Aadhavan is asked to kill a judge (played by actor Murali) who is about to submit a report on some nasty doings of a Doctor (played by Rahul Dev) and his henchmen. Aadhavan misses his target and we stare in disbelief. As we see hints of familiarity in the ensuing chase, where Aadhavan takes off like an orangutan on stolen steroids, we realize how makers of various Hollywood thrillers blatantly made use of the time machine to rip off snippets from Aadhavan's escape and inculcate them into their own cheap creations. (Among them, I noticed Wolverine, The Bourne films, Baby’s Day Out, The Matrix and Spiderman. I hope the director K.S. Ravikumar sues the studios responsible). Aadhavan takes the defeat to heart and pledges to knock off the judge himself, free of cost. Spinning a web of Machiavellian craftiness, Aadhavan traps the servant of the judge's household, a simpleton played by Vadivelu and manages to get into the house as an assistant servant. A retard might ask the insignificant question of why Aadhavan, who relegates people to the past with the ease of knocking over a domino tile, might go through this elaborate scheme, but I knew from the start that there was more to this thriller than meets the untrained eye.

Aadhavan's first two attempts to get rid of the judge mess up in what people of lesser intellect and even less patience might term as buffoonery or tomfoolery, but which in reality are purely awesome twists of Fate. As Aadhavan goes on with his schemes, he falls in love with the judge's niece Tara (played by the gorgeous Nayantara). I felt a little cheated at this but then consoled myself. After all every Romeo needs his Juliet, every Shah Jahan his Mumtaz and every geek his right hand.

As the edge-of-the-seat chiller proceeds, we are treated to several flashbacks that in the end succeed in tying up all those unwanted loose ends. In one of them, we see the magnanimous TN Police catch Aadhavan, the feared killer of men, and release him after eliciting only so much as a promise from him. I was touched by this rare show of faith in the human character and cried out in genuine sorrow only to be scolded by my neighbors. As for how the movie ends, you will have to see for yourself the epic climatic battle where Aadhavan reprises his role of the heavily drugged orangutan.

Purists might argue that there is no real comedy in Aadhavan and they would never have been wronger. Vadivelu (the quintessential comedy man) manages, as has been his norm for the past few decades, to be slapped by every character with a speaking role. Just like the laughter track in an English sitcom signals the presence of a Joke in the vicinity, Vadivelu getting slapped means that a Joke is lurking around (sometimes in disguise, but mostly having drunk the Invisibility Potion). Once you get the hang of it, it its all downhill from there. As for the director's 10 min comic-caper-cameo that concludes the movie, it was so wanted and hilarious that I must hire a couple of people to share the burden of laughing the next time I watch it.

The film stresses on advanced technology like laptops and pen drives and hidden cameras inside turbans and also manages to transcend the realm of Sci-fi with it timer attached RPG and Bluetooth bombs that can be detonated from a mile away. In short, Aadhavan succeeds at being the gritty story of an assassin as well as a fun filled romantic comedy at the same time, that is to be watched with the whole family, if only to let them know how much you love them.


PS: In possibly related news, Ubisoft announced that it had purchased rights to the story from director K.S. Ravikumar. Assassin's Creed 3: The Chennai Chutney Conspiracy (TBR: June 2011), the final chapter of the best-selling trilogy, will have Aadhavan as the playable character.