Heavyweight for lightweight hero

March 01, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 05:45 am IST

large canvas:‘Kaaki Sattai’ tries to launch Sivakarthikeyan into the big league.

large canvas:‘Kaaki Sattai’ tries to launch Sivakarthikeyan into the big league.

Film: Kaaki Sattai

Director: R.S. Durai Senthilkumar

Cast: Sivakarthikeyan, Prabhu, Sridivya

Sivakarthikeyan’s star is on the rise, so you cannot just cut to him in the middle of a scene in your movie. But he doesn’t have that larger-than-life image — not yet, anyway — and he is still known more as a comedian. How, then, to plan the hero-introduction shot? (spoiler alert) In Kaaki Sattai , the director R. S. Durai Senthilkumar has it both ways.

He thrusts us into a brawl in a police stationand a constable warns them, “Just wait till Mathimaran gets here.”

He’s referring to some sort of super cop, clearly. And on cue, we cut to a jeep that’s coming at us in slow motion.

The driver, of course, is Sivakarthikeyan (Mathimaran), but we don’t see him at once. We see him tap his fingers on the steering wheel. Then we see his eyes, then his feet as he slips out of the vehicle. And once he is standing, the camera rises slowly, from his feet to his face.

He strides into the scene we were in and threatens those thugs, like any big star playing a cop would. The twist? A little later, we see it’s all a dream. He’s just a constable.

This dichotomy is evident throughout Kaaki Sattai . The name comes from a Kamal Haasan hit, and there’s a nod to Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu . Rajinikanth is invoked through his cop movie, Moondru Mugam .

The story, too, is pretty heavy-duty, one that would suit a bigger ‘mass’ star, with a heftier screen presence.

It has to do with the illegal organ trade, and just a few weeks ago, we saw Ajith tackle this issue in his cop movie, Yennai Arindhaal . Can Sivakarthikeyan step into all those shoes? That’s really what Kaaki Sattai is about.

As overlong, utterly generic, badly written, indifferently made action-comedy star vehicles propelled by Anirudh’s growling guitar riffs go, Kaaki Sattai is as disposable as they come.

For a mega-star

The laughs aren’t great. The romance (with Sridivya) is perfunctory. The big action sequences look odd because they are choreographed with a mega-star in mind.

He looks a little out-of-place in those foreign-location songs too.

But may be in a few films, we will no longer feel this dissonance about a comedian trying to be a big ‘mass’ star. After all, as Mathimaran cannily reminds us, we do have the example of a bus conductor who became a superstar.

Baradwaj Rangan

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