Even if you ignore the fact that Paramount Pictures had to sue Lyca Productions for remaking Breakdown without buying the rights, Magizh Thirumeni’s Vidaamuyarchi just doesn’t have that compelling energy in it to make us say that he created his version of the 1997 film. When you watch a remake, you would expect the filmmaker to transport the story to a different setting in a believable manner and use the soul of the idea with some creative tweaks. When it comes to this two-and-a-half-hour-long version of the one-and-a-half-hour-long original, despite having footage and a title that means persistence, Magizh Thirumeni is struggling to show us the hero’s struggle.
The story is set in Azerbaijan, and in the present day, we meet our hero and his wife, Arjun and Kayal, just before a road trip. The 12-year-long marriage isn’t going smoothly, and the couple is on the verge of separation. The road trip that started smoothly ran into a lot of troubles, starting with a near accident, followed by a breakdown of the couple’s vehicle. What all happens in that road trip is what we see in this film.
I will be comparing this remake with the original for obvious reasons. So, mild spoilers will be there in the rest of the review. The only creative tweak I felt appreciable when I looked at it as a remake was the fact that Magizh Thirumeni gave it the backdrop of a dysfunctional marriage. In the Kurt Russell starrer original, the lead couple was a very happy one who ran into trouble in a lawless land. But the over-explanatory backstories are not at all essential to the story, and it is, of course, added to have some Pongal high for folks to dance inside the theater. The burden of the backstory is divided among the protagonist and antagonist. And the Joker-Quin kind of dynamic of the antagonist duo felt very animated and exaggerated.
The struggle of Vidaamuyarchi is in cracking the middle ground. Breakdown is almost like a survival thriller about a normal guy who wants to save his wife from a gang that has all the advantages. Expecting an Ajith-starrer film to keep him in that helpless zone for too long is kind of unreasonable. When you watch the movie, the fan service part is extremely low, and that sort of disappoints one major category of the audience. And if you approach it from the angle of seeing an authentic remake, the exaggerations in the end with all those Russian gangs, plastic surgery, and several other stuff, including the backstories, are sort of ruining the crisp and focused nature of the original.
The numerous cuts in the fight sequence are actually destroying the rawness of it. The makers who marketed the movie saying a lot of the stunt sequences were done without dupe are frequently intercutting those stunt sequences with CGI shots, and I was like, if you did the whole thing using a green screen background, the sequence should have at least had that visual continuity. Before the audience could clap for the much-hyped Hummer toppling scene, it got cut into a greenscreen shot. This problem of giving the audience a cue that something is going to happen and then ruining it by showing excessively cut action blocks was happening multiple times in the films. The terrain they have chosen is very similar to what we saw in Breakdown, and like everybody observed in the trailer, the color-grading really enhances the visual quality. Anirudh’s music, especially the title track, gives much-needed energy to this movie that was stuck in the second gear for almost 3/4th of its runtime.
The salt and pepper look, along with that outfit, really makes Ajith look dashing on screen. While the portrayal of the helpless, angry husband was fine, there were a few sequences in the flashback portions where he had to show extreme vulnerability, and the performance just didn’t land the way it was supposed to. Thanks to the backstory, Trisha gets slightly more screen time when compared to what Kathleen Quinlan got in Breakdown. The tracks featuring Arjun and Regena Cassandra were actually more commercial as it was completely created by Magizh Thirumeni. Even though those portions were your typical exaggerated Tamil movie tropes, it kind of offered the actors something to perform.
Vidaamuyarchi feels like a movie that is constantly in doubt about when to switch gears to be the Ajith Kumar movie it promised to be. And the source material is not giving it that scope to be this hero-worshipping story. So by the time it reaches that final showdown where the hero confronts all the bad guys, you, as an audience, would have lost interest in this wife-hunt. The original, Breakdown, is available on YouTube itself, and if you enjoyed watching it or Vidaamuyarchi, please do give a shot at the 1971 Steven Spielberg film Duel, which also has a similar backdrop.
Vidaamuyarchi feels like a movie that is constantly in doubt about when to switch gears to be the Ajith Kumar movie it promised to be.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
