Oru Nalla Naal Paathu Solren Tamil Movie
Oru Nalla Naal Paathu Solren (ONNPS) is bearing one of the longest and intriguing titles in Tamil cinema. Branded as a 'Vijay Sethupathi' movie, wherein he plays a tribal chieftain with a weird makeover. Vijay Sethupathi's unflinching enthusiasm to play a variety of characters and indulge himself in experimental plots have to be lauded. At the same time, it's about time that he hone the skills to judge whether a director has the "capability" to carry forth what's in his head to the screen effortlessly!
The movie opens with Vijay Sethupathi's voiceover, narrated against the microcosm of the universe, where we are made to cross galaxies, stars and planets and finally land on earth wherein we are introduced to a weird clan of tribes in Andhra whose occupation is theft. Yeman (Vijay Sethupathi) leads the clan along with his mother, Yamarosa (Viji). One day when he is out for "work" with his cronies, he sets eyes on Soumya (Niharika) whom he thinks he is destined to be united. He kidnaps and takes her to his village. Soumya's boyfriend Harish (Gautham Karthik) arrives at the village in search of her. Then the "mock-worthy" backstory of why Yeman wants to get hitched to Sowmya is revealed. Finally, things fall into place!
Positioned as a comedy caper, the movie blatantly takes a 'Soodhu Kavvum' approach to kidnapping. With dumb cronies, VS is allowed to go about things. But the big difference in here is the lack of humour. None of the characters was given a single line that was even remotely giggle-worthy. On top of it, there were these funky bits from Gautham and Daniel which made the proceedings even more tedious.
On the surface, a one-liner of this plot would have sounded juicy. And juicy it is! But the movie falters with an uninspired and amateurish piece of writing and direction. Why not employ a good writer to make the script "film-worthy"? Had it been taken up by a writer like Nalan Kumarasamy, it could have certainly reached at least half the height it ought to scale. Now, all we got was some sort of a rawly souped-up piece of mashups that would go down as another strange experiment by Vijay Sethupathi with a debut director.
Everything was bad, including the performances. Vijay Sethupathi tried his level best to salvage the scenes with his body language and dialogue delivery but was let down by the screenplay. As the title suggests, it makes me wonder whether director Arumuga Kumar is waiting for that auspicious day to tell us what he truly wanted to deliver! It's just not worthy to discuss any further about the movie. For now, just wait for it to get to Amazon Prime Video (official streaming partner).
