Venthu Thaninthathu Kaadu

Venthu Thaninthathu Kaadu. Cool Suresh shouting the next line “Simbuku vanakatha podu”, automatically pops into my head. He must be a soothsayer, the only thing I could applaud about this movie was Simbu’s performance. That kinda sums up my review, if you ask me how was the movie – I would say Simbu’s acting was good and ARR’s music was phenomenal.

See the story wasn’t that bad. But it definitely is not awesome, rocking or outoftheworld. But if you ask Simbu’s die-hard fans, they will tell you a different story. The thing is we have seen it all before. I felt what GVM had done was, take a bit of Pudhupettai, KGF, Gangubai mix, and add a layer of GVM flavoring to it and package it with ARR’s music. 

It is a story of this young guy, Muthu, from a village who comes to Mumbai, enjoys with his mates, kills some people, gets accepted as a man who can use weapons, (yes, all those scenes, which you would have already seen in Pudhupettai), then he falls in love (which would remind you of all other GVM movies) and then. grows a beard and turns into a KGF-copycat. (which ofcourse will remind you of KGF). Infact the first half of the story before he joins Mumbai was better imo, because this part didn’t remind me of any of the above said movies. It was slow, but a book is made that way, and I felt GVM was sketching Muthu’s character slowly. 

What about Jayamohan – his writing would have been different aache? You might ask. I asked myself too. Well, the first half of the story was picturized in a novelish kind. But the dialogues never stood out strong. It felt we were in GVM’s nice picture of the underworld. He had gotten rid of the dark flavors from Pudhupettai, that which we loved..the raw essence of people and their grittiness was all missing here…instead, everyone is all nice and doesn’t really badmouth another person. GVM has taken the rustic tone of Pudhupettai, added a beautiful coat of nice paint, added ARR’s violin as bgm to match. If we had a “Variya song” in Pudhupettai, we have “Mallipoo” song to match here. Selvaraghavan shows the dark world with dark scenes, while GVM has shown it in his own clean warm way. It just wasn’t powerful enough.

To me it felt like GVM had attempted a crossover as an experiment. I don’t know about you, but I have always felt his movies are of an elite nature…everyone can watch it and enjoy, but not everyone can resonate with it. Which is okay, because he takes movies of the people he knows and moves around with. All of his heroes and heroines will be talking English, and they will be these “cool dudes and dudettes”. But ofcourse, that is his style. Like Selvaraghavan’s movies will have some dark themes to it, and shows all shades of people, or Ranjith’s movies have a political undercurrent to it, GVM’s movies have been of posh nature, and he takes it well.

In this movie however, he has gone out of his comfort space and tried to take a Vetrimaran kind of film. His idea is good, but for such a kinda story, we need some meaty lines, or an adrenaline rush. Here, however GVM has taken a rough and tough story and has polished it to shine as a GVM film. We can even see his typical shots, where he moves his lens around to angles or scenes we really don’t care about…we even get the hero-heroine meet-cute scenes. 

But it disappointed me. Kinda fell flat for an underdog rising to power movie. Very few action sequences to get you to believe Muthu has even the potential to grow into a big guy. He goes bang bang in one scene, and he is considered big!! I still remember the scene where Dhanush is cornered by the opposite gang, and even being a puny guy, he kills them all because Selvaradhavan made us believe the fury that comes out from within him. He is shown to be afraid and at one point, Dhanush would be possessed by his anger and goes crazy. Ofcourse that is SR’s world. In GVM’s world, like I said before, he might have thought he was keeping it real, but the scenes where Muthu shoots others and people immediately say they were waiting for a guy like him to follow, didn’t seem realistic…All that he had was a gun, which the rest of the guys didn’t have. 

And the love angle – big bore. Totally takes you away from the seriousness of the film. Just when you think something interesting is going to happen between the 2 opposite gangs, GVM shows us love track between Simbu and Sindhu Idnani. As for the rest of the cast, Appukutti character was tailor made for him. So was Rauthar. They did their part well. I had different ideas for the Malayali, GVM gave me a different ending. I do wonder how he escaped from the mess he finds himself in at the end- that remains a loose thread. As for the music – ARR was great, took us to another world. I however didn’t see the necessity to have a Telugu and Malayalam song, where we couldn’t understand the lyrics, in a Tamil movie. I could watch a Malayalam movie for that! Maybe GVM felt, why not and went with it. 

Muthu keeps saying he never planned on doing a lot of things, but he has ended up in a place he never imagined himself to be….his eyes are nonchalant, mirroring his words. Maybe that’s the flavor GVM wanted to bring to the movie – a guy who is not really interested in becoming a Don, becomes one, by not doing anything big. I was a little let down by this movie. But GVM’s hardcore fans and Simbu’s fans will like it.