Ajith Kumar, who loves racing cars, chooses a fast-paced road movie as his 62nd starrer. Magizh Thirumen’s Vidaamuyarchi, with its wife-lost-in-a-foreign-country theme, sounds quite like the edge-of-the-seat treat that we all need when the weekend is weakened.
Sorry to say, Vidaamuyarchi is that little boy who tries to get attention by repeatedly holding his sleeping father’s face and prying open his eyes. This is a film that is desperate to please. The script adapted from a terrible 1997 Kurt Russell thriller (an aside: why remake a terrible 28-year old film?) is about a man trying to search for his missing wife in a foreign country.
Azerbaijani never looked less inviting, as Arjun (Ajith Kumar) makes a frantic effort to find his wife Kayal (Trishna Krishnan, looking frail and distressed even she is not meant to be). The screenplay emits the fumes of frantic manipulation, takes us on a whirlwind road trip to a hostile hinterland.
As the screenplay progresses, it gets progressively tedious to watch Ajith tilting sword at windmills, in a manner of speaking. There is no end to the wheels within wheels. Like one of those Japanese dolls, the suspense that comes out layer after layer gets smaller and smaller.
And the smaller it gets, the more noise the storytelling makes. The plot point when Arjun takes off for a road trip with his sullen wife, secretly hoping to mend their broken marriage, is the only time when the writing stops becoming pushy and gets kosher. This is when the couple encounters a bunch of hooligans. Arjun begs off saying he is not inclined to get into a fight. We come to understand that Arjun is not the typical Tamilian screen hero. Imagine if Rajinikanth’s screen-wife went missing!
There is hell to pay in Vidaamuyarchi, but not of the super-heroic dimensions. Ajith keeps his character under a firm restraining order. There are no larger-than-life fights except in a car crammed with miscreants where Arjun loses it. Apart from that, Arjun is often outsmarted by his evil avaricious enemies Rakshit and Deepika. The couple from hell is played by Arjun Sarja and Regina Cassandra as closeted psychopaths, outwardly normal. But wait till the script peels of their surface civility. They are a pair on a rampage.
Sadly, the script doesn’t favour any breathing space. It keeps rushing the characters into sticky situations that are as messy on paper as on screen. However, this insipid thriller is not devoid of plus points. The film is fetchingly shot in the desertland, with the frames conveying a certain clenched aesthetic wherein the mood of dread is never obviated.
Among the actors, only Ajith seems concerned about being in character. His wizened beard and the gait of a middle-aged man (at one point he tells his wife about the hooligans that they have “young blood”) go a long way into authenticating the road movie. Among the rest of the cast, Regina Cassandra’s bad girl act reminded me of the little girl who wants to hijack the attention that the little boy at the start of the review, corners by forcing his father’s attention.
