Do you recall the sound of the horn of lorries on highways? A remixed version of that unusually-high pitched sound serves as the primary background score in Kolaigaran (music is by Simon King though the hero, Vijay Antony, is a composer himself). It rings in our ears during the opening shot, and continues to play when the murder mystery plays out. It goes surprisingly well with the whodunittemplate that Kolaigaran is set in.
The film is a cleverly-structured tale: of Prabhakaran (Vijay Antony) who confesses to a murder in the beginning of the film. DCP Karthikeyan (Arjun) is listening in, but he is not convinced. He gradually starts investigating the case, and that opens up a can of worms that mostly keep you on the edge of the seat.
- Genre: Thriller
- Cast: Vijay Antony, Arjun, Nasser, Ashima
- Storyline: A murder takes place, and there are more than one suspects
Kolaigaran has a lot of similarities to Drishyam / Papanasam (both of which are unofficial adaptations of the Japanese novel The Devotion of Suspect X ), and much like the Malayalam superhit, the Vijay Antony-starrer also packs a couple of neat twists. The reason behind the actions of the protagonists and the guessing game played by the cops are major highlights, and the director reveals them all one by one, adding nicely to the suspense that is integral to the plot.
Arjun gets a well-written character as the cop, and performs well too, but Vijay Antony is a tad too plain as Prabhakaran. He has been playing the ‘I-cannot-act’ line in the film industry for a while now (and it is working well for him, as it does in Kolaigaran as well) but the least he can do is work on his dialogue delivery. His delivery of lines like ‘I-love-you’, ‘I went to office’ and ‘I committed a murder’, each conveying entirely different emotions, are all in the exact same voice modulation, and that’s something he needs to fix at the earliest.
What director Andrew Louis could have done is avoid the songs (‘Kollathey Kollathey’ and ‘Idhamai’ are nice tunes, but their existence in the film are questionable) and added a little more zing. A thriller like Kolaigaran ought to have had more pace instead of being filled with too many dialogues and establishing shots — any time Arjun calls upon someone for the investigation, he starts off with pleasantries rather than jumping into the matter of conversation. All these might have not mattered in a largely-generic film, but it does stick out in an otherwise well-intentioned, well-executed film.