Thupparivaalan

When a film that is 160 minutes long manages to keep you engaged for its entire runtime, that means the movie is entirely invested in its content. Thupparivaalan directed by Mysskin is an engaging pacy detective thriller that has the right amount of ingredients to be a refreshing commercially appealing exciting movie.

Kaniyan Poongundran is a very sharp detective who currently has got no cases and is frustrated for that reason. He has a certain value system for choosing a case. Declining an offer worth 50 Lakh Rs to find a girl who ran away from the family, Kaniyan decided to take up a case of the death of a Pomeranian dog for an amount of Rs 887. The seemingly simple case however had links to some huge racket and through the film Mysskin is convincingly showing us how Kaniyan exposes a lot of people.

Mughamoodi was one film where Mysskin tried his Desi adaptation of a foreign idea and messed it up completely. But in the case of Thupparivaalan, which is highly inspired from the Sherlock Holmes stories, he manages to keep things on the logical rational side. There are of course these filmy ways of creating a deadly set of antagonists, but Mysskin never fails to keep them look real even when they are high on swag. He even adds a texture of humaneness to his baddies. There is a scene in the movie where a dying antagonist decides to kill his paralyzed wife and that scene was really an unexpected tweak from what one would have guessed. Similarly Myssikn has added many such tweaks to the ends of many scenes in Thupparivaalan and that makes this movie look more inclined to a fresher narrative.

At the core Mysskin knows that it needs the treatment of a commercial movie. So he packages it cleverly with action set pieces that stay within the rhythm of the fast paced narrative. When it is a Mysskin film you can’t expect any hero worshipping scene or song for that purpose and Thupparivaalan in that sense doesn’t try to give any buildup to its central protagonist. These kinds of movies usually tend to have certain unimaginable things done by the antagonists. But here Mysskin uses the brutality of the acts of the villains to give them characteristics. The villains in the film are quite deterministic. The fastness in Sherlock’s analysis of characters is attributed to Kaniyan too. The situations and characters created in this movie never goes in vain. At one point I felt the character played by Anu Immanuel is just going to remain as a love interest of Kaniyan, but much like all the other characters in the film, she also has a role in the totality of the story. But I really hated the way Mysskin wrote that scene where the heroine is greeted with a broom by our detective and she accepts that welcome with a smile. The frames had style and realness. The wonderfully executed chase sequences and action sequences were chiseled neatly. The background score backed the mood of the movie perfectly. The typical Tamil movie tone that peeps out discretely was one negative I sensed in Thupparivaalan.

Vishal is an actor who had the potential, but his choices in the recent past made him a star that only did one kind of role. In Thupparivaalan, Mysskin gives him a character with peculiarity and he performs the role without making it a caricature. Except for that emotional scene with Anu Emmanuel, Vishal was in complete control of the character all through the film. Prasanna’s Dr. Watson inspired Prabhakaran wasn’t just a mere friend. Vinay shines in the negative role (Was it really his voice?).  Anu Emmanuel has a character with brief space for performance in the film. Andrea Jeremiah is also there in a character that sort of focuses on her looks. Rest of the cast has names like Simran, Jayaprakash, John Vijay etc. in small yet important roles.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, Thupparivaalan has a length of roughly 160 minutes. And the major positive of this film is the fact that it stays focused and fast in its entire runtime. It was fun watching Thupparivaalan and I am pretty sure that the fun word wasn’t associated with a Vishal film for a long time.

Rating: 3.5/5