Theri film review: This man is from Mass
Atlee’s screenplay checks all the boxes, and we’re checking these boxes ten minutes ahead of him.
So we wait for the hero-introduction scene. Maybe he’ll smash through a
wall and land a punch on a villain who is extorting money from
slum-folk. Maybe he’ll ride in on a bike, in slo-mo, the scene lasting
long enough for fans to expend all the wind in their lungs through
wolf-whistles. But no. When we first meet Joseph Kuruvilla (Vijay) in Theri,
directed by Atlee, he’s bent behind his bike, fixing it. Beside him,
his daughter Nivi (Nainika) stamps her foot impatiently. Then, a car
speeds past a puddle nearby, and the water splashes on her. This is it,
we think. Joseph Kuruvilla’s face will appear. He’ll give chase. He’ll
break the driver’s bones. Or at least leave an impression of his
fingerprints on the driver’s cheek. We get the face. We get the chase.
And we get a tame finish, with the driver being asked to apologise. What
the…
Instantly, we know the story. Any film in which a mass hero is a mouse
in the early reels will feature a flashback in which we see him as a
tiger, and then a second flashback in which we see why this tiger
transformed into a mouse. Atlee’s screenplay checks all the boxes, and
we’re checking these boxes ten minutes ahead of him. But that’s not the
problem. We don’t go to these movies expecting finely etched narrative
arcs and convincing characters.
But we let all of this pass because what we look for are the mass
moments, the moments that creep past the logic centres in the brain and
affect us almost atavistically. Like the one in which several goons are
taught a lesson in a third-standard classroom. Like the bit with Vijay
dancing to a Dhanush song. Like the interval moment at the bridge. Like
the moment where a just-orphaned kid takes a Five Star bar out of his
pocket. And I’m sure the legions of Atlee’s young fans, the ones who
fell hard for his earlier film Raja Rani, are going to make screensavers
of this line: Love solla vekka padaravan vaazhave vekka padaravan. But there aren’t enough of these moments for such a long, predictable movie that keeps reminding you of Chatriyan and Baasha and Ramana and a hundred other tiger-turned-mouse-turned-tiger sagas.
Even the questions that run through our heads are predictable. With all
the money at their disposal, why aren’t the action scenes better? How
long are we going to keep countering dishoom with dishoom? Where are the
nail-biting thrills in the stretch where a school bus filled with kids
veers off into a river? Why are GV Prakash’s songs so unmemorable, and
when are they going to find a choreographer who can really do justice to
Vijay’s extraordinary dancing abilities? The casting of the great
director Mahendran as the antagonist sounds great in theory, but why is
the character so ineffective?
What are the Censor’s Board’s criteria for awarding a U certificate?
This film has a line where a forensic examiner speaks of rapists
eradicating traces of semen by violating the victim with a rusty iron
rod. There’s a scene where a gun hovers over an infant’s head. Men are
found with their genitals lopped off? Which part of all this screams
“this is a movie for the entire family”? At least the question of why
there isn’t much comedy finds an easy answer. Once you cast Amy Jackson
as a schoolteacher in a small town in Kerala, the laughs come
automatically. At one point, she asks Joseph, “Malayalam theriyadha?” Lady, you can barely get by in Tamil, and now we have to buy you as a specialist in the southern languages?
Vijay works best in the light-comic zone of a Thuppaki or a Puli,
and he totally sells the scene where he charms the family of the girl
he loves (Samantha). But Atlee keeps nudging the actor into heavy-duty
dramatic zones, with an eye on the section of the audience we like to
call thaaikulam. (If P Vasu made an action movie, it’d feel like Theri.)
The hero sheds tears of sorrow for the rape victim. He sheds tears of
joy when his little girl is born. He loves loves loves his mother
(Radhika, in one of the most grab-the-cheque-and-run roles of her
career).
I’m not saying you cannot find a place for these sentiments in a
mass-hero movie, but the film ends up schizophrenic trying to balance
them with the more macho stuff the actor’s fans want. So after all those
tears, we end up with the hero as the ghost who walks, a phantom who
appears out of nowhere to dole out justice. Someone like Netaji, we’re
told, whose death remains unverified and who could be doing the kind of
villain-dispatching the hero does here. In Kollywood, it’s just a little
leap from INA to WTH.
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