Appeared in Expresso, the daily supplement of The New Indian Express, on 08 February, 2011
A girl gets kidnapped from a main road on a dark night. The next day, a package is found at a public place that contains severed body parts. The police and CBI are brought in immediately, when the scene shifts to an office where the head of the intelligence department is seen calling for someone. The call sounds out again, this time, teetering between anxiousness and anger, when we get to see JK’s (Cheran) face, whose back until then was alone is visible to the viewer, thereby patenting his own intro scene-for-the-hero). Thus begins Mysskin’s thriller saga, Yudham Sei.
An officer of the CB-CID, far from the stereotyped Ray-Ban toting, trigger-happy cop, JK decides to call it a day, when he is thrust with the task of finding the Hannibal Lecters behind the parcels. He is smart, assertive and is able to throw light on patterns of murders that confound top police officials. His sister has been kidnapped, and he feels that this could be related to this eerie happening. Another angle gets added to the mystery, a la Agatha Christie, when the case of the suicide of a doctor’s family has been closed abruptly, and comes to JK’s attention. Mysskin blends the sub-plots with one another that sustains the viewer’s interest to a certain level beyond which, it peters out and becomes a tad predictable. (Think Rajni’s Naan Sighappu Manidhan, Kamalhaasan’s Indiran Chandiran, or Sasikumar’s Easan.)
A taut first-half accompanied by a gripping music score are among Yudham...’s pluses. Gone is Cheran’s persona of Autograph and Thavamai Thavamirindhu, and in place we have a CID Shankar-like character. The fight sequence atop a foot-over bridge is largely reminiscent of that inside a hospital in Anjaadhe. Y G Mahendran, Lakshmi Parthasarathy, Jayaprakash and Dipa Shah perform ably in their roles.
A girl gets kidnapped from a main road on a dark night. The next day, a package is found at a public place that contains severed body parts. The police and CBI are brought in immediately, when the scene shifts to an office where the head of the intelligence department is seen calling for someone. The call sounds out again, this time, teetering between anxiousness and anger, when we get to see JK’s (Cheran) face, whose back until then was alone is visible to the viewer, thereby patenting his own intro scene-for-the-hero). Thus begins Mysskin’s thriller saga, Yudham Sei.
An officer of the CB-CID, far from the stereotyped Ray-Ban toting, trigger-happy cop, JK decides to call it a day, when he is thrust with the task of finding the Hannibal Lecters behind the parcels. He is smart, assertive and is able to throw light on patterns of murders that confound top police officials. His sister has been kidnapped, and he feels that this could be related to this eerie happening. Another angle gets added to the mystery, a la Agatha Christie, when the case of the suicide of a doctor’s family has been closed abruptly, and comes to JK’s attention. Mysskin blends the sub-plots with one another that sustains the viewer’s interest to a certain level beyond which, it peters out and becomes a tad predictable. (Think Rajni’s Naan Sighappu Manidhan, Kamalhaasan’s Indiran Chandiran, or Sasikumar’s Easan.)
A taut first-half accompanied by a gripping music score are among Yudham...’s pluses. Gone is Cheran’s persona of Autograph and Thavamai Thavamirindhu, and in place we have a CID Shankar-like character. The fight sequence atop a foot-over bridge is largely reminiscent of that inside a hospital in Anjaadhe. Y G Mahendran, Lakshmi Parthasarathy, Jayaprakash and Dipa Shah perform ably in their roles.
Many shots were from the japanese movie "rashomon". The way he starts the movie with the rain. Myskin is a student of Akira Kurasawa's movies and it is very much evident in most of his movies. Inspite of this I would commend him for making such great movies in Tamil. We might have seen such movies before but his narration was really good. Even in the movie Cheran makes a mention of Rashomon. Its a pity that we people dont watch such great movies. Atleast we have people like Myskin who opens our eyes and make us watch good movies. had it been some other masala director, am sure the movie would have been vulgar and unwatchable.
ReplyDelete@ Nice review too it was unbiased :). I remeber the days when we used to discus about movies in the bus "7D". Good work buddy :)
Finally, a Cheran movie that I would like to see.
ReplyDeleteThe sentimental deluge in his movies was too much for me.
Nice review. Keep 'em coming.