Its been quite a while since we have embraced upon an urban love story laced with action. The movie ‘Run’ that got released in 2002 was sort of a trendsetter for the young directors post 2000, in the context of transforming a timid and demure ‘chocolate’ boy (Madhavan) to an action hero by imbibing certain larger than life acts into the narrative and engaging the audiences with some engrossing commercial elements. That worked out pretty well for a while until the concept was overused and became stale. The concept has been resurrected by debutant Manimaran with the help of his mentor, director Vetrimaran who has also penned the screenplay and story for Udhayam NH4 and has also produced it.
In the opening scene, Prabhu (Sidharth) and his cronies are shown planning to abduct Rithika (Ashrita Shetty) from her Bangalore residence to Chennai. The reason behind the abduction, their love story and the consequent actions taken by her wicked political father (Avinash) with a run-of-the-mill climax wherein the couples emerge victorious has been attempted to be depicted in a fresh way that was novel to some extent.
The story was narrated in a series of flashbacks that intentionally had some loose-ends and that got tied up with different characters narrating their part of the story from their own perspective. Another driving force for the movie was KK Menon, the tough ‘Dirty Harry’ kind of a cop who chased the love birds right from the word go and served as a glorified henchmen to the heroine’s father.
Sidharth looked somewhat okay for this role. But for a character of that of a crude guy, who has been brought up in Royapuram, his in-built sophistication was sort of a spoiler. I was expecting this since Vetrimaran had earlier mentioned in an interview that the story was written with Dhanush in mind.
Ashrita Shetty has made a very safe debut. Her voice looked beaten down and moody and somewhat gelled well for her character. She should have been careful enough to show some modulation in her tone or should have asked the dubbing artist to do so.
Avinash as the wicked politician was a bit of a stereotype and had little screen presence.
‘Adukalam’ Naren was almost always shown talking over the phone for the little part that he had.
The new bunch of friends that Sidharth had were somewhat fresh, especially the fatty whose one-liners were relieving to some extent.
Technically I felt the film was a bit beaten down. Especially the editing was poor and in some scenes the characters’ mouth sync went awry. Maybe the use of different languages in the movie, as the story happens in Bangalore, might have been the reason.
Music by GV Prakash was good. ‘Yaaro Ivan’ and ‘Ora Kannala’ were contrasting numbers that appealed.
The movie was a simple action love story that was attempted to be told differently, but the execution had some flaws, thanks to the performances and screenplay. Had this story been handled by the man himself (Vetrimaran), he would have added the inevitable finesse which he always had in all his movies.
Verdict: Worth a Watch!
Rating: 2.5/5
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Ya Bharani.. Actors' Performances are great.. especially of kk menon.. i think you have missed to applaud Velraj's awesome cinematography. As U rightly said... Dhansh might be the best choice for this movie.. G.V.Prakash has to go long way in re-recording,It fails to deliver a true flavor of the movie in many scenes (Same holds true for Paradesi also)