SU Arun Kumar’s latest film after Chithha is an action drama that tries to get into the complicated dynamics of the rivalry between police and gangsters. If you look at the structure of the screenplay of this movie, it doesn’t have the texture of a film that will have a major star in it. The major tussle here has nothing to do with the hero, and ultimately, it is more of a survival story of a guy who just wants to stay away from the violence and take care of his family. But by building intriguing scenes one after the other, SU Arun Kumar makes us an onlooker of a lot of events happening over the course of one night.
Set in Madurai, the film primarily revolves around the rivalry between one of the prominent gangsters there, Ravi, his son Kannan, and the area SP. SP, who has not really done anything to settle the scores with these men, gets a chance to do so when a missing case gets filed against Kannan. How this situation escalates dramatically and how our hero, Kaali, gets dragged into this whole equation is what we see in this film.
Almost 80% of this movie happens over one night, and what works here is the construction of scenes. Nothing here is mentioned or shown without purpose. Every detail that is presented in a very casual manner has an objective. While some of those setups have immediate payoffs, some take a lot of time. For instance, I will mention a harmless one. The interval block of this movie happens humorously, and we have Vikram going from one room to another through the window. And later, this window passage is getting used at a serious moment. Rather than introducing too many unexpected things in every scene, Arun Kumar is smartly placing everything at an earlier stage to make things look exciting once the payoff happens.
There is a flashback scene in the movie, which we can see in the trailer of the film, and that is perhaps the only area where the script gives Kaali, our hero, that slightly over-the-top aura. If there is a drop or inconsistency in the movie’s energy, that is mostly in that area. In terms of writing, SU Arun Kumar has this complicated task of letting us know about things from the conversations of characters, who don’t need to explain it to anyone. So, the dialogues are placed in such a way that we will have to build the story of Part 1 in our heads from the clues we get from the banter between characters. And, of course, there is that brief flashback in the film to perhaps remove all the probable confusion.
SU Arun Kumar has opted for a very rustic visual aesthetic for the movie, and by maintaining the color palette and going for mostly hand-held shots, Theni Eswar maintains the tension in the narrative. There is a very extensive single-shot action block in the movie, and the choreography is so perfect that you won’t really see actors making adjustments to accommodate the camera people. The background score is mostly on the subtle side, except for some of the obvious heroic moments. And doing justice to the treatment, we only have two songs that blend smoothly into the narrative.
Vikram, as Kaali, is pretty believable, and I wouldn’t really call it a challenging role for him as he is playing a guy who can do the violent stuff but is resisting all that for the sake of family. Certain scenes in the film, especially in the flashback, demanded a kind of feisty body language, and he did that convincingly. SJ Suryah, in the hands of SU Arun Kumar, almost goes into that Iraivi zone of acting. A larger chunk of the roles SJ Suryah is doing are various versions of some sort of eccentricity. The character of the SP on paper had all the scope to be another theatrical character, but SJ Suryah plays it in a different style.
Suraj Venjaramood was a real surprise for me. Since the trailer had no lines of his character, and I saw him speaking broken Tamil with that Malayalam accent in those viral promotional materials, I was kind of thinking they might have opted for dubbing. But Suraj has lent his own voice to the character, and it really sounded authentic. The baggage of the past characters never really became a hindrance for him to pull off the negative shade of this character. Dushara Vijayan, as the better half of Kaali, is not a mere character who has no contribution. Through the ups and downs of the story, Dushara gets to play various emotional states of that character. Every other name in the elaborate supporting cast has done a solid job.
As a cinephile, what made me curious about this movie was the decision to choose one pivotal night from a long chapter of violence. If you look at the story part of this movie, everything is happening over a span of a decade. Rather than making it a linear story of the evolution of many people’s revenge, SU Arun Kumar decides to bring almost all of that into a single night. It’s like deciding to chop almost 90% of the events from a story and then deciding to build a movie from the premise of the climax. I wouldn’t really say Veera Dheera Sooran is a film that would give you that conventional theatrical high. But how they built something solid on a very slim space, primarily through writing, gives the cinephile in you a creative high.
How they built something solid on a very slim space, primarily through writing, gives the cinephile in you a creative high.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
