Velaikkaran

One thing I can say with confidence is that after stopping the remaking business, Mohan Raja has managed to acquire this ability to create exciting antagonists. Velaikkaran from Mr. Raja is far from being perfect and at the same time has moments that could have been converted in to a more captivating experience. With this film, the director of Thani Oruvan is trying to step into a zone which people like Shankar has explored in the past and for me this was a watchable average movie.

Arivu is this young man from a slum in Chennai who wants to give a better future for his fellow human beings who are living a miserable life in that slum. He has started a community radio to spread awareness to them on having a better life. At one point in life Arivu had to join a food manufacturing company as a sales person and some of the experiences from there taught him a lesson on what a responsible worker should be. His efforts to spread that knowledge to create a social change are what Velaikkaran showing us.

When you talk about movies that have made a serious impact on people by influencing them on social change level, the one movie I can easily say is Rang De Basanti. And in Tamil, director Shankar has mostly tried to make films in that zone with more entertainment ingredients. On a concept level Velaikkaran has some appreciable values on which the film is built. But the problem is the loudness of the execution. In general, mainstream commercial Tamil films including the recent Vijay movie Mersal are not known for being soft on the social reformation part. The climax of this movie has some ambitious things happening and it wasn’t giving me any Goosebumps.

Sivakarthikeyan’s character this time has a calmer tone which was somewhat different from his usual blabbering characters. Nayanthara unfortunately gets a sidelined role after getting a promising start. The man who stole the show was Fahadh Faasil for me. It’s not the Malayali bias. One can easily sense the smoothness in his performance as Aadhi. Mohan Raja who constructed the antagonist very carefully has taken the perfect guy to play that role. The movie has got a wide range of actors performing small roles with relevance and that includes people like Prakash Raj, Sneha, RJ Balaji, Sathish, Rohini, Thambi Ramaiah, Mahesh Manjrekar and many others.

From building a huge set for a slum to exploring the tactics and realities of food manufacturing companies, the research and effort put on this project by Mohan Raja is huge. But the weakness is in making it a script that has compelling nature. Through the movie Raja shares a lot of information using a mass medium like cinema. But the typical song and dance elements and unsubtle depiction of plans reduces the influential element from the film. The most engaging part of this movie is in the midway of the second half where we get to see the smartness of our antagonist. The cinematography was fine. Cuts are untidy and the music is largely irrelevant. The art direction was fabulous while the visual effects weren’t that great.

Velaikkaran had the scope to be an influential commercial entertainer if it wasn’t this wide spread. It is one of those interesting concepts where if you ask me “is it a good movie?” I would say “It’s not bad for sure.”

Rating: 2.5/5