Vijay Antony plays a mover-and-shaker who can get anything done for you at a cost. But when he gets caught, the film turns into a tired old vigilante story, and the preaching begins to pile up. The rest of the review may contain spoilers.
If you need something done, Kittu is the man you want to call. Vijay Antony plays this character in Arun Prabu Putushothaman’s Shakti Thirumagan. He can get a lowly cop’s daughter into a good school. He can rotate funds. He can get kids the land needed to build a squash court. He can get the items needed for a big ritual ceremony. He can arrange for the killing of a paedophile. He can arrange for a big-shot’s son to get out of jail. And if you lost your life’s savings of 40 lakhs to a man who took the bribe and did nothing, Kittu will get the money back for you. But for all these services, Kittu will charge an amount – and he has amassed thousands of crores. So is he a good guy or a bad guy? This is a Tamil film hero we are talking about, so I guess the answer is obvious.
The strength of the film lies in its pacy presentation. Let’s take the instance of the sum of forty lakhs. We see the big series of events that involves the retrieval of this amount (there’s even a godman involved), and that is the film’s template. The screenplay is cut into little bits of information that gradually give a big picture, and these little bits are edited together with the zing of a pop-music video. Every shot appears to have been filmed from a dozen angles, because there seems to be such diversity in the footage. The film’s first half shows us everything Kittu does, by making calls and pulling strings. The best stretch occurs after Kittu marries Vembu (Trupti Ravindra), and combines his honeymoon with a mission to transfer property from a top politician in New Delhi to her PA. It’s a breathless passage, and if one part of you wants the film to slow down and breathe a little, the other part realises that none of these events are exactly new, and slowing down would only expose the clichés.
But just before the interval point, Kittu is caught – and the film begins to fall apart. The very clichés that flew by due to the fast filmmaking now make their presence felt because the action stops and the advice begins. We are told that petrol prices are rising, farmers’ lands are being stolen, inflation is rampant, public transport is inadequate. Instead of taking one issue and making Kittu the vigilante-saviour for that issue, Shakthi Thirumagan makes him solve all of India’s problems. We are told that he has stepped in everywhere the government has not. Why did he do this? There’s a very generic flashback that shows a young Kittu getting life lessons from a Periyarist. (Sample: “Vayathu pasi udamba valakkum; arivu pasi manidhabimanatha valakkum.”) The villain is a Tam-Brahm, who’s called a fox. “Avan thuppara echi aayiram varushathukku veshama maarum.”
Some of the dialogues are nicely constructed, with a good ear for the language, but after a point, we know where things are headed and the film becomes tiresome. It goes on and on. There’s no break with, say, Kittu and his wife. I am not asking for a song, but she’s essentially reduced to a series of reaction shots. Does she agree with her husband’s methods or is she shocked to find that the man she married isn’t who she thought he was? Shakthi Thirumagan isn’t interested in characters. It only wants events. In a weird way, this does not kill the movie because we have seen all of this many times before. There’s one intriguing stretch that cuts from Kittu being abandoned as a baby to a ritual at the temple of a goddess. I thought that was a hint that, like the title suggests, Kittu is indeed Shakti’s “thirumagan”. But the film does not take this anywhere, and that shot just remains a visual. But as I said, the pacy presentation saves the day.
