What kept me excited through much of Vijay’s Vanamagan was how the director has managed to infuse Kollywood’s mass heroism into the character of a tribesman living in a remote Andaman island. Apparently, his island isn't that remote, given how he behaves almost exactly like any other Tamil hero. Like in the scene where a little girl runs into the deep forest and loses her way. Vasi (Jayam Ravi, who plays the tribal quite convincingly) comes to her rescue as a tiger lurks in the background. As the tiger pounces on the girl, Vasi shields her, while also slitting the beast’s torso, in one free-flowing slow-motion shot. Just as we wait for the tiger to bleed to death, our hero plucks a thorn and ‘stitches’ the wounded tiger back to health. Apparently, ‘Save the Tiger’ is a campaign that’s trending in the forests as well.
- Director: AL Vijay
- Cast: Jayam Ravi, Sayyeshaa, Prakash Raj
- Storyline: A tribal man’s encounters with modern civilisation and its stranger aspects
Scratch the surface and you realise that much of the film’s core would have worked just as well even if you’d introduced Vasi as someone who hails from a remote village. Without doing any justice to its tribal setting, here it is used as just another dispenser to facilitate the many must-haves of commercial cinema. Instead of exploring a character as fascinating as Vasi, the director resorts to treating it simplistically like he did with Vikram’s in Deiva Thirumagal . And when Kavya (Sayyeshaa), the ‘modern’ brat who takes care of Vasi, falls for him, it’s more to do with the mandatory need for a love track and the two ensuing duets.
Even the portions showing Vasi’s first encounters with technology and ‘civilisation’ hardly go beyond what we’ve already seen in a dozen films like Encino Man, The Gods Must Be Crazy and George of the Jungle, and Vanamagan is likely to work only if one has not seen any of these films. What more do you say about a film thathas already said all it had to in its two-minute trailer?
