Mugamoodi – The Velayudham within

After the viral “Okay nu solran” speech by Mysskin, Mugamoodi has released with huge expectations. Mysskin claims that it is the first “superhero movie” coming out of Tamil Nadu. The Dark-Spider-Karate Kid a.k.a Mugamoodi is no exception to movies releasing with huge fanfare, and then colossally failing to meet expectations.

It seems like Mysskin wanted some movies to refer to, after having decided to make a superhero movie in Tamil. He probably went through Batman and Spiderman before being impressed by the former. He probably then went on to choose the most successful Batman movie, The Dark Knight, as the base for this script.

The cast of The Dark Knight is matched up with corresponding ones in Mugamoodi. Upon finding that no one can possibly recreate the role of Heath Ledger, Narain who was chosen for the role tries to imitate him as much as possible throughout the movie. It was too big a role for him, and he ends up acting like a nutcase during the climax. They choose Girish Karnad for Alfred’s role and since Butlers are not that common in India, they make him Jeeva’s Grandfather. Nasser is chosen as Gordon, Selvaah as Ra’s Al Gul and Pooja Hegde as Rachel. Despite all this effort, they couldn’t even try copying Lucius Fox by Morgan Freeman. They end up casting a random tailor who makes the costume for our Superhero.

As the main story-line hasn’t been reworked upon, one can discount the work on the writing part. But the screenplay had been re-written properly including some songs and comedy tracks which, as Mysskin claims, are necessities for a movie to become a hit nowadays. The movie kicks off with the classic crime scene by the masked villain. Then comes the most shocking experience for a Tamil movie viewer ever – copying the whole movie didn’t seem to suffice for the movie makers so they’ve ended up blatantly copying the Marvel title card. At least they could have done some research as to which universe Batman belongs to.

Mysskin must have thought that a plain English movie rip-off might not work out well so he decides to add some Tamil elements to the script. Pooja Hegde is made Nasser’s daughter and Jeeva, who makes a bad first impression, tries to woo her by wearing a weird costume (may be a Vallavan reference?). The intro song had to be placed somewhere and the decision becomes easy as the whole song is about the how great the boozing is. The hero’s friend questions why everyone’s boozing when they could do much more with money, and the song apparently contains the answer. We’ll just refrain from commenting on Vaaya Moodi – you’ll have to watch it yourself for the on-screen excellence. A police officer is created to work as a double agent, and the hero is given three friends to hang out with when he’s partying, the hero is given parents so that he can disobey his father’s words while his mother protects him and finally the hero’s friend is killed which agitates him to take revenge on the villain.

Batman originally had Ninja training. Since Ninja is not almost unknown here, it’s been changed to Kung fu. To make it more different from Batman, Karate Kid references have been included. Just to give an impression of seriousness, the movie starts with a “dedication to Bruce Lee” even though he had nothing to do with Kung fu. The hero is nicknamed as Bruce Lee and he fights with villains who are also well-trained in Kung fu. The hero’s Kung fu trainer had a tragic flashback which is revealed during the second half – and that had completely nothing to do with the story. The trainer teaches the hero the usual “ultimate move” which he uses in the climax to defeat the villain. Since the producers wouldn’t have cared about buying large ships and loading it with people, the climax scene is a clear lift from Spiderman – the hero has to save both his girlfriend and a bus full of school children.

After completing the final draft, they give it to K expecting him to pull a Hans Zimmer. His original background scores are out of the world except in some places where he tries to do a Zimmer, which one could easily assume to be because of Mysskin’s pressure on creating a perfect remake.

Tamil Nadu’s superhero movie is now complete. In order to make it seem like everything hasn’t been copied, black becomes blue and the hero’s mask has been designed so it doesn’t disturb his hair style. The hero performs circus stunts for entertaining small kids. Just to make sure that some overly matured audience don’t manage to find the cheap rip-off this movie is, they make two strangers watch the superhero run in a hospital. One of them asks the other as if he were Batman and the other replies “Ithu Batman illa. Vera yaaro”.

Mugamoodi – A hero that Tamil Nadu doesn’t deserve or need.

[rating:4]