The film is a remake of ‘Breakdown’, but it adds a lot of flab to that lean-mean thriller. While it’s nice to see a hero acting his age, there’s a lost-in-translation feel throughout. The rest of this review contains spoilers.
For a top-tier leading man, the timing of Ajith’s filmography may be the coolest ever in terms of work-life balance. Let’s just take the last 10 years. In 2015, he does Yennai Arindhaal and Vedhalam. Then, he vanishes from screens for two years – to do his biking or racing or whatever fun things he does – and he returns with Vivegam, in 2017. Once again, there’s a two-year break, and Ajith returns in 2019, with Viswasam and Nerkonda Paarvai. Then, we get a three-year break, until Valimai, in 2022, and Thunivu in 2023. And now, two years later, we have Vidaamuyarchi and in a few months, Good Bad Ugly. This may seem risky in terms of a career. I mean, what if you come back after a long break and the film fails? But Ajith doesn’t seem to care. As he said in the recent viral interview, life is fleeting. He encouraged his fans to live life fully, like he does, and embrace growth. That’s so cool.
I just wish the quality of his films was equally cool. There have been a few ups, more downs, and mostly mid-level movies. Vidaamuyarchi falls in the latter category. Its intentions are solid, but what we get on screen is a middling, bloated genre piece. In an action-thriller, the audience wants only two things: action, and thrills. And yes, an intriguing leading man. This is not the genre where we go looking for deep, meaningful relationships, or even much novelty. Take Denzel Washington’s awesome Equalizer movies. We’ve seen these stories a hundred times, and yet, what makes this 101st time a pleasure is… the leading man, the action, the thrills. All Magizh Thirumeni has to do in Vidaamuyarchi is stick to this formula, which is taken from the 1997 Hollywood action-thriller, Breakdown. That film was 90-odd minutes long. Vidaamuyarchi runs a whole hour more, and a lot of the film looks stretched. It looks like someone tried to make a deep David Lean epic out of something that just needed to be a simple, exciting genre piece.
The story is about a couple on the road. The wife goes missing. The husband has to find her. That’s it. But Vidaamuyarchi, set in Azerbaijan, adds an affair, a divorce angle, a mental asylum, a friend’s betrayal that may be real or a lie, and a whole backstory about how this couple came together. Perhaps this was a Tamil-cinema necessity, that when you have Ajith and the ageless Trisha in a movie, you have to show some love scenes and give the audience some eye candy. These early portions are smoothly written and edited, going back and forth in time, but the content is extremely generic. There’s no spark in the romance. If they did want to take this route, the scenes about falling in love and getting married should have had much more flavour. Maybe the idea was to keep it as natural as possible, but the result is that the film takes a long time to take off.
For a big-hero Tamil movie, Magizh Thirumeni does make some interesting choices. There is no slow-mo hero-introduction scene. When we first see Ajith, it’s through his car, which plays a big role in the movie. It’s an organic introduction. Plus, the character – named Arjun – apologises in order to prevent a conflict, and he is called a boomer. He is even mocked, when he’s sent to a ladies’ restroom. This is not a superhero. This is a hero playing his age. This is also a film where not every scene is about the hero. Ajith shares a lot of screen space with his supporting characters. And for a big Tamil film, the idea that love is not permanent, that people change over time and so their feelings for each other change over time – this is a refreshingly grey shade. It’s not fleshed out well, but just the fact that it’s there made me happy.
But this is also why the Trisha character’s actions and motivations seem convenient at times. The big ending looks contrived. The way Ajith rescues his wife looks contrived (dogs are involved). The issue with Vidaamuyarchi is that it is a film that wants to be Hollywood, but also wants to be accessible to local audiences – and there’s a lost-in-translation feel. There’s the sense that not all threads are closed satisfactorily. There’s the feeling that twists have been introduced just to keep the audience off-balance and not because these twists genuinely add to the movie experience. There’s a constant sense of momentum – the film is always moving — but there are no big highs. Ajith is in good form as a vulnerable leading man, and I really liked the Arjun-Regina Cassandra combination, even if their backstory isn’t all that great. Vidaamuyarchi looks slick, but it’s finally a film that exists in between Hollywood and Kollywood. It would have better had it been full-on class, or full-on mass.
