How often do you see Yugi Sethu sporting a balaclava and killing people? How often do you see a lesbian couple going for it on screen in tamil cinema? Homosexual implication between the hero and the villain? A kamal film without any unnecessary Kamal fawning? Thoongavanam had all of these. But for someone like me who still hasn’t recovered from the awesomeness of Uttama Villain, Thoongavam needed something much more to make it a great film. The fanboy in me was waiting till the end to jump out of excitement but the movie made the neutral viewer side of me take over rather easily.
When will tamil cinema get over this police office having a dysfunctional family cliche? And this using family member as leverage for something cliche? How long are the writers going to take this easy way out? When the premise of a villain negotiating with the hero with a leverage has been set up, the audience nowadays can guess almost 50% of the scenes and dialogues in the movie. Including the twists. The concept has been used up so much that there is nothing new to introduce in that anymore. Thoongavanam also falls victim for the same set of cliches but surprisingly it is not as boring as the other movies with a similar setup.
The film has very few dialogues which could be both a good thing and a bad thing for a kamal film. The chances of the movie being banned becomes lower, lesser dialogues to note and dig many layers under later to find the actual meaning. On the other hand, less chance for kamal to showoff his charm in one of his greatest area of expertise. There are a few quirky dialogues but there also are a few that could easily be labled as ‘punch dialogues’. And most of them didn’t even have the ‘punch’. And it was pretty weird for kamal to try delivering those dialogues.
Despite being an official remake and having a rather predictable story, the screenplay was very carefully written to be as interesting as possible. We know that the protagonist is going to get caught for replacing the cocaine with a dummy, we know that there is going to be a rat inside the department, we know that there is going to be a fight between the two villains, we know that there is going to be a friendship betrayal, but how all these scenes are written, directed, and linked together makes a huge difference. I haven’t seen the original so I would rather confine myself from crediting someone for keeping the screenplay interesting.
It was so heartening to see Prakash Raj play one of his good old cool comedic villain character which comes so easily for him. But the kid who played kamal’s son steals the show. The movie doesn’t warrant any award-worthy acting but it is quite difficult to round up a cast where everyone does an equally good job (except Trisha, of course). More than half of the film is filled with party music in the background and Ghibran has made it as less annoying as possible. There isn’t much role for music in the film other than the ‘introducing glitch music’ marketing gimmick.
But it was quite sad to see someone who was making movies with multi-layered screenplay drawing parallels between film and real life and every other film being termed as ‘way ahead of it’s time’, sink down to the levels of mundane one line punch dialogues and a completely unnecessary final scene with flying cars and thala-thalapathy-esque buildup and retail shop endoresements. Who should be blamed for this?
