Amaran Review | A Biopic That Documents the Journey in a Fairly Engaging Way

The one thing that makes the audience root for the characters in the latest Sivakarthikeyan starrer Amaran is the love story of Major Mukund Varadarajan and his wife, Rebecca Varghese. The army part of the story, which may have consumed the bulkier chunk of the budget, is largely a documentation of the soldier’s life. Even though the times they both spend together is short, it is the warmth of the bonding between the couple that strengthens the emotional core of Amaran and the less researched Malayalam bits and the way Rajkumar Periasamy forces Sai Pallavi to be a Malayali girl is diminishing the charm of this love story consistently.

So the film is about Major Mukund Varadarajan. In college, he met the love of his life, Rebecca Varghese. Even though Rebecca was a fully supportive partner who gave all the emotional support for him to be a soldier, the families, especially Rebecca’s parents, were hesitant about this marriage. What we see in the movie is the life of Major Mukund Varadarajan once he became a husband and father, where he sort of celebrated the little time he got to spend with his family and dedicated the rest to the country.

It is very hard not to get emotional towards the end of the film, as we see Rebecca receive Ashok Chakra for her martyred husband, Major Mukund. But rather than the filmmaking brilliance, I would say it is largely due to the respect for the soldier we already have or just formed seeing the series of events in the movie. The structuring of the screenplay is pretty generic, making it look like a highlight reel of the central character in the first half and multiple detailed action blocks in the second half. The thing is, it is not a fictional story to demand a twist in the tale. But even biopics can be made compelling if the storytelling can find a unique perspective. In the case of Amaran, that is somewhat missing.

There is a zone where Sivakarthikeyan thrives, and it is the one where he effortlessly handles humor along with romance and the vulnerable bits. If I am not wrong, Amaran is the first time we see him as this testosterone-high character who screams and shouts. While he carried the body language of a confident military officer convincingly, I felt the dialogue delivery in those areas could have been slightly more fiery. Sai Pallavi, as Rebecca Varghese, delivers a performance where I feel like screaming at the director. In terms of body language and how she conveys her love and concern through expressions, the performance is nothing short of excellent. The way she resists tears during the funeral will break your heart. But the way Rajkumar Periasamy makes her say broken Tamil, in order to make her a Malayali, spoils the performance at many places. We Malayalies have a knack for learning languages, and since the movie is mostly happening outside Kerala, it wouldn’t have been a problem at all if Sai, as Rebecca, spoke fluent Tamil. Whenever she spoke, it felt like a Tamilian trying to speak Malayalam while it should have been the other way around.

Farzi fame Bhuvan Arora plays the role of Sepoy Vikram Singh, and making him and the whole battalion sing “acham illai acham illai” was a bit too cheesy. Rahul Bose played the part of Mukund’s commanding officer. It was nice to see Shyamaprasad doing the father’s role of Rebecca with a realistic dialect. Even though Shyammohan’s dialogue delivery was good, the JK hangover the audience has kind of makes his anger unintentionally funny.

In his second film as a director, Rajkumar Periasamy opts for a more ambitious project. The beats of the writing are pretty generic, as there are no major efforts to find drama in the story. It is actually the performances that are elevating the movie beyond the usualness of a soldier story. The execution of action blocks looks pretty good, while the editing in certain sequences is creating confusion. Some of the sequences are choreographed in a very loud and evident way. The blocking of the whole scene, which features gallery-pleasing references like Fahadh Faasil, Thuppakki, Anbe Sivam, etc., has no surprise in it as we could really anticipate something coming. The tracks are pretty heartfelt, and the on-screen chemistry of SK and SP makes them sound merrier.

I have a request for the Tamil industry. Unlike some of the other languages, we don’t really demand dubbed version releases of your movies. Kerala’s audience actually celebrates the Tamil movies. So, in the future, when you make a film that has characters and places from Kerala, try to hire a writer or some creative director to make sure the authenticity is maintained. Thinking that including four Chettas in a sentence or calling Mukund Mukunde every single time is a Malayali thing is as frustrating as listening to lungi dance as a Tamilian. Barring this important aspect, everything else about Amaran is appreciable in totality.