Movie Review - Raavanan

After more than a year, an event has finally happened which made me revive this blog. A new Maniratnam movie. Oh Yea, there are some things in life that HAVE to be talked about.

"Opinions are like you-know-whats; Everybody has one", the saying goes. And everybody has an opinion about Raavanan. Anecdotal evidence suggests that reviews by Indian viewers are more critical than the forgiving NRI gumbal that is desperate for any form of entertainment.

So yea, the movie is not all that bad. It is most definitely not boring. But, if all of Mani's creations were ranked from 1 to n, this would land at the very bottom of the heap. Why? Well, i'll dwell on the pluses before the minuses

Pluses -

- Vikram's dynamite performance: From the "saavu melam" that he beats in the opening sequence, to his shy proposal to Ash, Vikram is world class. If i were Raagini, I would have texted Dev asking him to get on with his life and lived happily ever after with hottie Ravan!

- Camera -OK, read all the other reviews to learn more about this

Minuses -

- Ash - She had her hey days, and sadly, those days are long past. And no, I am not referring to her age here. She looks jaded, far beyond her years. OK, so she does look watchable on the big screen, but if you were to take away her skin and make her eyes look black rather than green, would she still be the lead in such a big budget movie?

- A.R Rahman - Dude, yea, you did win the Oscar, but did you leave your sruthi potti behind in LA? The "chandthiranum sooriyanum" line in Usure pogudhe is the most egregious example of abaswaram. And the Keda curry song? No wonder Mani didn't give a shit about song picturizations in this movie

- Dialogues - Mani's movies have always been lauded/laughed at for the dialogues. They have always been uniquely weird - all the characters speak in crazy clipped sentences like "Vittudu.. ...Ellathayom....Ellathayom vittudu...". Nobody talks like that in real life, but somehow, they kinda made sense in the universe Mani created in his earlier movies. Here, Suhasini's dialogues are more verbose, and yea, everything goes to hell. I cannot write anymore on this topic, i am still tired from the onslaught of gramathu thamizh that is probably not spoken in any gramam on this planet. See, there is NOBODY more boat-club-road-chic and urbane than Suhasini and Mani, so WHY O WHY do they insist on doing something they really don't have a clue about?

And then, here is the biggest biggest flaw in the movie....Dev's character. The problem does not lie with the fact that Mani tried to create a positive Raavanan and imbibe shades of negativity into his Ram. He has done this before and succeeded - remember Mammooty in Thalapathi? He played Duryodhana's character and he was portrayed as this modern day Robinhood who Rajni (Karna) would give his life for. Nobody had a problem with that movie, and it remains one of Rajni's best. That movie succeeded because Arjun's character (played by Arvind Sami), served as a perfect counter point to Karna and Duryodhana. And the audience took sides with both the good guys and the "bad" guys (at least in the eyes of the law). Dev is no Arjun, and the movie suffers for it. Mani should have had the guts to make him either perfectly good, or super bad. He does neither. Dev ends up looking like a boring A***le. You neither like him, nor can you bother taking the effort to dislike him. What a cop-out.

And speaking of cop outs, is Mani being paid to make movies for Ash and Abhi?

So really, the movie is not bad, but that isnt saying much; anybody can rehash a famous epic, and draw plenty of inspiration from earlier epics they already adapted into cinema (even Thalapati was about a Robinhood that an honest government official wanted to arrest)

Mani, we really expected so much more from you......

PS: There is a very bright silver lining here; Remember Dil Se? Yea, everybody likes it today, but 10 years ago, it was universally panned by critics and flopped. And then, Mani quit messing around with bollywood (atleast for a brief while), totally went back to his roots, and gave us..sigh...Alaipayuthy. Hope history repeats itself.