Alaaudin, on the surface, doesn't have many things going for it. A hero who is not exactly known for picking good projects, a new director, the long time it has taken for the film to reach the screen and the lack of publicity all point to another stinker. But the movie manages to surprise us. With a well-thought out, interesting screenplay and a fast pace, Alaaudin turns out to be one of the better entries in recent times. With the right kind of publicity and better timing, the movie could have fared much better at the box-office.

Alaaudin(Prabhu Deva), abandoned as a baby, has been brought up by the whole locality and is considered a member of all their families. When tragedy befalls one of the families of the locality, Alaaudin announces that true to his name, he is now in possession of a magic lamp whose genie would make all their dreams true. To make this happen, he becomes a Robinhood, stealing from the rich and one such episode makes him cross swords with Gangadharan(Raghuvaran), a rich man. Meanwhile Preethi(Aashima) falls in love with Alaaudin seeing his good nature but her father(Manivannan) is opposed to it since he is poor.

The movie has a well-paced screenplay and a story where a whole lot of things happen, on its side. The movie does start off in leisurely fashion with comedy as the priority as Prabhu Deva attempts to retrieve his dollar from Aashima and Manivannan allows what he thinks is a romance to move forward since he mistakenly believes that Prabhu Deva is a rich man. But even in these portions the director shows us that he has his thinking cap on since the situations that lead to Manivannan's mistaken impression are quite cleverly constructed.

The movie really picks up its pace once Prabhu Deva begins his nocturnal activities to make the people of his locality happy. With a romance, robberies, murder and blackmail, the movie has its plate full and this ensures that the story keeps moving forward rapidly. But the director has not relied simply on the multitude of things going on to hold the viewer's interest. He makes his presence felt in several sequences with some nice and clever touches. The way the director makes Prabhu Deva escape from his robberies with the help of his upbringing is neat and the one scene where the children think he is on a flying carpet definitely deserves high marks.

The movie then includes one more cliched twist but even this one turns out to be a little surprising because the number of things that have been going on have made us forget this issue. But the twist turns out to be the movie's undoing since it leads to a rather unsatisfactory climax. There is some anticipation regarding how the main issue will be resolved. But in the end, there is no sense of closure and we left hanging.

Prabhu Deva brings his usual facial expressions and body language to the role. But a couple of scenes(like the one where he realises what poverty has driven one of the families to) show that he has made an effort to act too. Aashima manages to give him good company in the song sequences but has little to do otherwise. Raghuvaran gets by on his usual style while Manivannan has a few funny lines. Yaaravan... is a catchy number in the soundtrack.