My Review of Avan Ivan

COMPREHENSIVELY MISFIRES

Bala, one of the trendsetting directors, has always delivered emotional, heart-wrenching, and disturbing films. This has been his style of film making and he has seen a great amount of success in it. After winning a National Award for his previous directorial venture, Naan Kadavul, Bala has tried his hand at delivering a full-length comedy film. But sadly, the movie does not live up to the expectations and goes awry right from the first frame.

Vishal and Arya are step-brothers and are always at each other's throat in the first half of the movie. Their respective mothers (Ambika and Jayaprabha) are also at daggers, but they all incidentally live in the same house. An ex-king, named highness, plays the role of pacifying both Vishal and Arya. He has lost all his fame and wealth but is still respected by all the local people living in the region. Vishal starts to develop a soft corner for a lady constable (named Madhu Shalini) whereas Arya goes after a tutorial college-going student (sorry.. couldn't find her name)!

The whole movie plods around these characters for the most part and then in order to deliver the director's touch, he introduces an antagonist half an hour before the climax and leads us into a fist-fight conclusion. The whole problem of the movie is that it does not have even a wafer-thin plot. The director has penned the screenplay in order to say that he is capable of delivering a full-length comedy. The movie seems to be made for Vishal to help him break his commercial hero status. He has worked on his body language and his squint eyes and does a very good job. Frankly speaking, he is the only silver lining in the movie!

Bala also manages to extract decent performances from the other characters (Arya, Ambika, Highness, the small boy). Arya, for the whole movie, plays second fiddle to Vishal and tries to make the audiences laugh with his gimmicky body language and dialogue delivery. But the most irritating characters of the movie were the cops and I am wondering why Bala has reduced inspectors into comical machines in his last two movies. I feel very sad for the villain because he is not able to deliver anything substantial in his tenure as an actor (career shift?.. maybe)!

Technically, the movie has hardly anything to speak about. Except the Elangaathu Veesuthe-style song, there is nothing really to speak for Yuvan Shankar Raja. The audiences are treated to crisp editing in the last 20 minutes. On the whole, the movie lacks a solid plot and puts the audience in sleep-mode right from the first half. Mr.Bala, with all due respect, you are better off doing serious films with comedy sprayed in between rather than the other way round. Hoping to see you with a solid script next time around!