There are directors who love to add excessive slow-motion to scenes. And there's Siva. He adds 'fast-motion' to his set-pieces. We don't get to see what's really happening, because the camera moves at lightning speed and so does the hero (all his movies have been about hero- worship with an overdose of family sentiment - this shtick has reached its tiresome saturation. It's 2017, not the 80s anymore!). The break- neck editing style doesn't accentuate the viewing experience either. Even if (some of the) set-pieces in 'Vivegam' are clap-worthy in terms of ideas, this jump-cut method kills the execution almost completely. Except for the hero who owns every frame he's in, we don't even know who's getting beat-up or killed.
Remember what Dicaprio had to go through in 'The Revenant' (the struggle in the cold, wilderness while recovering from injuries)? Well, Siva summarizes all that toil (and more, like doing inverted crunches) in a song where Anirudh screams 'Thalai Viduthalai'. Vivek Oberoi who plays the major antagonist and secret-society agent (I'm not kidding) Aryan, although welcomed initially as a neat addition to the ensemble, persistently keeps heaping praises on his arch- nemesis (who he addresses throughout the movie as 'Nanbaa') Ajay "AK" Kumar (played by none other than Ajith Kumar) a renowned covert (contrasting choice of words, but that's exactly what he is - he makes stealthy moves but he blows places up and shoots everyone he doesn't like) operations specialist, who's betrayed by his own team.
Aren't even the most generic hero-villain sagas more entertaining when the villain is always two steps ahead of the hero? Here, it's the other way round. AK has a solution for everything, and I mean everything. Before an idea even cooks up in Aryan's head, AK's already executing it. "That's AK for you!" - Aryan himself says this like ten times. As if we didn't know. Meh.
Yes, everyone including white Europeans speak Tamil (either via double-layering or directly) which is fine considering we can at least fixate our eyes on the proceedings and not the subtitles. But the accents make the delivery sound unintentionally funny on most occasions. The foreign actors do a very generic job and their dubbing / lip-sync is terrible. Worst, Siva is trying to follow the 'Bond' template but one that's strictly grounded to suit Tamil cinema sensibilities. So the hero doubles as a family man, the best husband around, who at times even fries onions at his wife's (Yazhini, played by Kajal Aggarwal) South Indian restaurant (based in central Europe mind you, yet replete with saree-clad attenders and 'Rajavin Parvai' singing executive chefs) when he isn't frying someone's head on his job.
Technical mumbo-jumbo is spat out from almost every character in the movie - each character in AK's team is given a one-shot intro scene (with an animated pop-up that details their work stats - Gosh, the funniest stuff you'll read. For eg. Skill #3 of the 'Head of Interrogation' - INTERROGATION!). The spelling errors are glaring - STRATERGIST for 'Strategist' (Really?); Mission Coun? Where's the T? How can you trust the instincts of a movie that can't even get its spellings right?
'Vivegam' also has the worst hero-introduction scene in recent times. Subpar visual effects try to convey the fact that our hero, who took his own sweet-time to mumble a few lines in Tamil followed by "Never, ever give up!" to a bunch of military grade officers, had just jumped off a lofty dam - shooting and adjusting his watch on his way down and swimming away to safety. Kajal's character is added just to elevate the character played by Ajith. We have scenes where she keeps reinstating how she is the luckiest wife in the world to have a husband like him, and the quintessential 'passing the inspiration' scene where she goads her husband to kill everyone who betrayed him. Heck, our man bothers to mouth exhausting monologues to the antagonist over the phone even when his wife is struggling in labor. Towards the end, even Aryan seems to have given up - he tells AK exactly what he plans to do and how he's gonna go about it (makes things easy, right?).
Bits and pieces of 'Surviva' are used effectively as BGM, while the rest sound too noisy. The climax set-piece, set in a cave, comes exquisitely wrapped with the "Holy sh*t!" moment. See it to believe it.
Verdict: Alt+Ctrl+Delete!
