The Vivegam-AK25-Ajith fan effect

Around a little more than a month ago, Madhavan-Vijay Sethupathi starrer Vikram Vedha released, that spoke loads of how the medium called cinema can be used to weave a story so engaging that you spend most of the time at the edge of your seat. On a basic level, it is just the same old concept of good versus bad. But then, at least 80 percent of films across the globe have the same base.
If so many films are the same at that level, how do we still come across films that hit us like cool breeze on a hot summer day from time to time? That requires a multi-fold answer.
Primarily, deciding the setting of the story — where does this story happen and what kind of people are involved in it? Then you decide, mostly through mere instincts as to who are the good people and who they have to oppose. Once that’s done, like twining a pair of earphones, tie knots and twists in the story and then hint the audience on how they can untie the same knots (hints preferably given one at a time). The writer works on all these and the directors realize them into visuals and try to fit the writers’ work into the confinements of the practical world. When the same person writes and directs, it is easier as one can write while keeping in mind the extent of practicality. Different writers and directors work in their own unique ways and that is how we get the variety of films we see.
When you watch Vikram Vedha, you will be able to witness the effort that the writers and directors, Pushkar and Gayatri, have taken to check all boxes to make a film that’s pretty close to perfect. This film has definitely joined the elite list of films that include recent ones like Thani Oruvan, Dhuruvangal 16, Maanagaram, Iraivi, Soodhu Kavvum, Kaaka Muttai and Jigarthanda, to name a few.
Having seen such a fine crop of films release in the last few years, when a film claims to be of high standard, you expect something on the lines stated above. For Thani Oruvan, director Mohan Raja took time after his previous no-brainer Velayudham to write such a tight script. A similar story can be drawn for Pushkar and Gayatri on Vikram Vedha. So when you know that a movie has taken 2 years in the making, you definitely expect the director to have put in a serious effort…or so I thought.

4 PM. Enter Devi Bala. A small theater with just about 12 rows of 18 seats each. The room was buzzing with excitement from a few, obliviousness from a few and doubt from the rest who read morning reviews before entering.
Thala entered the screen , just a silhouette shot and such a huge welcome from the audience, including me, shouting our throats out. As the minutes passed, the noise, excitement and belief of witnessing what the director boasted repeatedly across all promotions for the film, died down.Instead of an “international spy thriller”, Vivegam turned out to be a low burner filled with cliches, every character speaking in a monotone, an extremely exaggerated depiction of emotions, unnecessarily long , artificial, annoying dialogues and simply bad writing. So bad is the writing that the villain is both the hero’s enemy and someone who’s almost in love with him! For you need to build up the hero’s image and there’s no other way than letting the villain praise him, even in the middle of a heated fight. This movie is also basically a battle between good and bad. But now, we were getting greeted to an example of how a medium called cinema can be used to make people sit for 150 minutes and make them assume that a story might unfold at some juncture.

First of all, no one in this film is a spy. Yet the director is doing the rounds announcing that this is “an international spy thriller”. Hmmm. Husband is a Counter Terrorist Squad team leader. He is busy with his job at the moment. But wife expects him to pick her call everytime. Whether it is in the middle of a hot bike chase with a convict on the pillion seat or when the former is hanging for his dear life on the branch of a tree as four people try to shoot him down. Hmmm. A dangerous criminal has access to unlimited ammunition, automobiles and what not (so much ammunition that he can afford to use enough sniper bullets to write his initials on a wall!). Hmmm. Husband and kidnapper beating the hell out of each other and kidnapped wife chooses this moment to break into a song. Hmmm. With 10 seconds to go before a nuclear bomb explodes, the hero decides to give a punch dialogue about honesty . Hmmm. Hundreds of machine guns firing away, trying to hit him and he kills everyone with two pistols. Hmmm. Jumps off a dam, lands almost headfirst and survives with no injuries (not even a concussion?). Hmmm.
Cut shots so fast that they can leave you dazed, stunts so unreal that you wish someone can pull that off in real life, an actor who has gone through loads of physical agony in addition to what he already has in life, a music composer who decides to screech in the middle of the climax song because the scenes are not powerful enough, camera so clear and angles so perfect that a passerby could actually mistake this to be a Hollywood movie, are the components of Vivegam that director Siva has relied upon heavily to compensate for the complete lack of story and logic.
The end credits showed the risks and agony that Thala was put through and as his fan, that brought me into writing this. Remember that annoying sound and the good-enough-for-a-reality-show VFX that comes up whenever the time is shown in Bigg Boss? Filling the film with something like that, making computers that only Tony Stark used before, accessible to even some random passerby in the background of every shot, and getting everyone to speak in a monotone whilst over-pronouncing every single word and using a language that is borderline archaic, does not give you a slick, sharp, James Bond style thriller. These all simply explain how pedestrian the director’s conceptualization of such a film is.
If we have to talk about Thala, we need to categorize the 5 types of fans he has — people who started following him since Aasai/Kadhal Kottai, since Vaali/Amarkalam/Mugavari, since Dheena, since Billa and since Mankatha. I, fall under the second category and so I speak for such fans — the pre-Thala fans.
For a brief period around 1998 to 2002, Ajith did a variety of roles. Some worked and some didn’t but at least he came across as someone willing to attempt to be different from his previous works — something that we now witness in Vijay Sethupathi. Then came the dark period between 2003 and early 2007, where only 2 of his 10 films clicked. And as we all know, his career was resurrected with Billa in late 2007. I wonder if Ajith came to a conclusion post Billa, that only sticking to gun-sword-wielding action roles would work for him. For since then, barring Mankatha and Yennai Arindhaal, every role seems to be making Ajith look colder and colder on screen. And Vivegam has just reached the peak of that cold mountain.

Take a look at Vijay’s career and you can see that he had a similar dull period between 2001 to 2004, got a blockbuster in the form of Ghilli, followed by monotony in roles between late 2005 (Sivakasi) to 2010 (Sura), with just a single hit in the form of Pokkiri. Ever since, none of his movies are a reflection of the film preceeding them.
Such is the eagerness that we pre-Thala fans have to see him break that coldness, that his 5 minute role in English Vinglish, that one scene in Yennai Arindhaal where he is left to explain Trisha’s death to her daughter, was enough for us to look back at the promise that Ajith had as an actor (not just a performer) in the past. The only way to show that promise again is by getting a good distance away from director Siva and his films, and trying to take Vijay’s route.
I ended up walking out of the theater with a throbbing headache wondering how Siva thought this could be even remotely compared to an international film (making Vishwaroopam look like Naked Gun to Siva’s James Bond), why Ajith went through so much for this and wondering if Ajith can ever rekindle our hopes to see the actor Ajith and not just the performer Ajith. But mostly, the headache was caused by my regret for spending 190 bucks for this!
