Vijay Sethupati is an actor everyone loves and respects. Sure,he has made mistakes in the past. But none unforgivable. Ace comes close to being a fatal error in the versatile actor’s career. The one film in which he will cringe when his children watch it . What was he thinking when he agreed to be part of this brainless burlesque?
In our many conversations, Vijay has constantly stressed the need to blend entertainment with his cinema of social relevance.
But where in Ace is the entertainment or the message? As flat as a pancake, the film rides on its own high, prevaricating when the plot needs to move, or reversely, loitering when things need to move on, this is one of those films that mistakes nullity for swag and creative bankruptcy for improvisation.
To see Sethupathi caught in this whirlwind of witlessness is to be reminded of a cinematic truth: even the greatest of actors need to believe in what they are doing. It would require a miracle for any actor to believe in what writer-director Arumuga Kumar serves up in Ace.
A bunch of idiotic characters who belong in a menagerie, strutter and stumble around trying to be funny and relevant. Or maybe not funny, though they do seem laughable in their selfimportance. The location of the idiocy is Malayasia. Once Kannan(Sethupathi) lands there he is thrown together with Arivu(Yogi Babu) who is to the plot the catalyst and comic relief.
Jokes about the character and at the expense of the character, abound. Whoever wrote this film , thinks making fun of a not-handsome man is a lot of fun. Kannan , our hero,seems partly an accomplice and partly a distant observer of this distasteful film’s malfunctioning machinery.
Vijay Sethupathi has two uninteresting love interests in the film. Kalpana (Divya Pillai) runs a restaurant and Rukku(Rukini Vasanth) is a salesgirl in a clothes store. They are both working women with fiercely independent minds and they both need financial assistance to pay off debts.
Our hero Kannan plays poker to pay of their deebts, and fails. He then robs a bank.
Yes, this is how low the writing stoops. To watch a thinking actor like Vijay Sethupathi fall for this immoral imbecilic act of transgression is to wonder why he needed to do this. One hopes the money was good. Nothing else is.
