Valiyavan (Tough Guy) - Molten lava in a brittle bottle!

Every director in the tinseltown wants to have a shot at a full fledged commercial entertainer. Be it for honoring the whimsies of the producers and distributors or to meet the insatiable needs of the ‘wannabe stars’ to make deep inroads into the fiefdom of ‘mass cinema’! Few manage to strike gold and the rest end up on the flip side with their flippant narration and half-baked stories that fail to gather steam. Director M.Saravanan who made a successful debut with ‘Engeyum Eppothum’ has come up with his third venture that doesn’t want to get labeled under a particular genre due to its fickle storyline that is spun around flippant characters and a dragging narrative that was punctuated heavily with songs and unwanted portions of jaded one-liners!

Vinod (Jai) works as a marketing executive at an upmarket mall and he falls in  love with the yuppy Subhiksha (Andrea) who works at a bank and also happens to be the colleague of Vinod’s father (Azhagam Perumal in a nice role). Things go without any hassles until Vinod finds out that he has to fight with Ashwin (Aaron Chaudhury), an international boxer, in order to win his lady love’s heart. Then the saggy backstory gets revealed and finally the good triumphs over the evil with a happily-ever-after ending.

The first half was simply a drag to say the least! Almost everyone except Azhagam Perumal and Anupama Kumar were lacking energy and were offering some of the worst performances till date. The songs were randomly thrown in as fillers and the audiences were left to pray in order to not allow the director to insert more songs. There were some genuine moments that were beautifully set up for a laugh riot, but those remained as missed opportunities largely due to over-exploitation of those scenes. The portion where Jai is on a high and Andrea has to drive him around in her swanky BMW could have been written on a funnier scale had there been enough discipline with respect to the dialogs and crispness with respect to the duration. And sorry Balasaravanan for not doing enough to make us tickle.

Though the backstory was a justifiable plot, should there be a heroine in the story to kindle the fire inside the protagonist? Also Andrea’s annoyance with the antagonist was not all that well etched out. She manages to convince Jai to fight the antagonist (who is a renowned international box) with a few cribs which is as banal as “che che che, po po po”. At this stage I was heart-broken to see a director with a ton of potential, genuflecting to the demands of today’s “commercial” coated entertainment in the name of cinema or in other words, cinema that is largely believed by the production fraternity to bear the saleability tag! Pathetic!!

Verdict: Avoidable

Rating: 1 / 5