Tamil Rockerz

When someone decides to create an 8-episode series about Tamil Rockers, the infamous online website that was a major threat to the Tamil cinema industry a few years back, we hope to see the lesser-known facts and interesting insights about the whole thing. But Tamil Rockerz, directed by Arivazhagan, feels like a lame and superficial visualization of a WhatsApp uncle about how Tamil Rockerz operates.

Officer Rudra is given the charge of a case against a notorious piracy group named Tamil Rockerz, who have threatened to release actor Adithya’s Deepavali release Garuda through their website. Rudra has only a few days to find these criminal minds. How he does that with his team of officers is what we see in Tamil Rockerz.

As the group is still a mystery to most people, there is ample scope for imagination, and I wasn’t expecting a Netflix documentary. But this idea of pirated CD shop owners taking revenge on a producer sounded super silly. If Arivazhagan had a discussion with any of the young folks who used to download pirated content, he wouldn’t have made them look like some kind of terrorist group who roams around with big bags to untraceable locations. Because they are clueless about how the whole thing works, Arivazhagan is focusing on spilling the industry secrets. Inflated budgets, the involvement of the hero’s father, the struggle of a debutant director, and we even have the back story of a producer who is now in a mental hospital after he lost everything when his movie got pirated.

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The common issue I see in tech-related thrillers is the struggle of the director to spoon-feed the audience about the basics of hacking, cyber forensics, etc. The funny part is that to make the viewer aware of all these things, they create scenes that look bizarre on screen. The same happens in the case of Tamil Rockerz. In Arivazhagan’s imagination, the arrest of Tamil Rockerz happens amid gunshots and blasts in a militant-filled forest. The hacking sequence, the content collection tactics, etc., look very lame. Remember how Vineeth Sreenivasan “hacks” Manjima Mohan’s email password in Oru Vadakkan Selfie? The content collection strategy of Tamil Rockerz reminded me of that.

Arun Vijay plays the role of Rudra and is in his usual distress mode. He has the coolest hairstyle for a police officer grieving his wife’s demise. Vani Bhojan is paired opposite him as a cyber forensic officer. Vinodhini Vaidyanathan and Vinod Sagar are pretty much playing the usual comic relief characters. Azhagam Perumal is that greedy caricature producer. The grown-up Kakamuttai kids are also there in this series. Tharun Kumar and Sharath Ravi, as the Tamil Rockerz folks, are on the animated side.

Because of the sheer silliness of the writing of this series, the original Tamil Rockers might refrain from leaking this content. Tamil Rockerz from Arivazhagan is more like a melodramatic request to the viewers to not watch movies through pirated sites. With all the cybercrime activities presented in an unnuanced way, Tamil Rockerz rarely grabs your attention with its craft.