Jayam Ravi. Say what you will about his earlier film choices being remakes or below average ventures. The man has shown to persevere despite his lack of dumdaar vocals usually heard in most crime thrillers. After Ajith Kumar's cop act in YENNAI ARINTHAAL (2015), here's another cop thriller that entertains and keeps you glued in from start to finish.
Like all crime thrillers, there's a major arc that acts a common thread between the corrupt department and the messiah cop himself. Unlike what we've seen umpteen times starting with Atlee/Vijay starrer THERI & the recently released Rohit Shetty's SIMMBA is that the messiah's themselves fret and frolick around the first half with their love interests, bumbling comedy (if you call Yogi Babu, Rajendran comedians, no judgement) and all around the verbal diahrrea claiming police should be A,B,C, 1,2 3. This is followed by over-the-top heroism, dialogue-baazi, songs that act as speed breakers (especially in the latter-half of the film) and finally a punch-statement/moral to wrap up the film. Adanga Maru does away with this to an extent.
While the first half starts ordinarily, the film takes its leisure to setup the who's who of the story and carefully places one circumstance after another to get the viewer hooked instead of exhausting them with aforementioned antics that say a big star can get away with (or rather blind-sided by his loyal fans.) The intro and love songs while functional, could have been trimmed and limited to just promo songs for the film instead of be included for the feature film.
But once the pre-interval scenes come into the play, the film doesn't linger further and jet-speeds on from the start of the second half all the way into the finish line without throwing everything at once at the viewer. The cat and mouse scenes with Ravi and Sampath are the highlight and I shall not reveal anything more. The film rests on Ravi and only he can do such roles unlike the current crop of heroes in Tamil Cinema. This is also Sampath's best til date and it's refreshing to see him not going into usual villany histrionics as seen in the past.
Dear Atlee, Rohit Shetty/Team Simmba, THIS is how you make a taut police thriller without being flamboyant, preachy and over-the-top.
