In the review for Thambikku Indha Ooru, I wrote about how Bharath, who had some interesting movies and roles early in his career, had jumped on to the masala bandwagon. The same could be said about Jiiva who, after showing us his mettle as an actor in films like Raam and Katradhu Thamizh, has also turned to play a mass hero in commercial films. His latest offering in that route is Kacheri Aarambam. While the film's light-hearted, self-aware approach makes it a bit different, it isn't enough to overcome the other weaknesses of the film, like the cliched story and the weak villain.

Pari(Jiiva), after a tiff with his father over his habit of taking life too lightly, moves to Chennai with the goals of earning money and gaining his father's respect. When he is saved from an accident by Madhi(Poonam Bajwa), he falls for her and tries to woo her. But he soon learns that Sivamani(J.D.Chakravarthy), a feared local don, has his heart set on marrying Madhi and deals harshly with anyone who as much as talks to her.

The film simultaneously embraces and mocks the masala genre and announces its intentions loud and clear right from the beginning. The frequent nods and winks to the audience do work in keep us smiling through otherwise familiar happenings like Jiiva's heroic entrance, his do-gooder deeds and his fight with his dad. As the movie proceeds and becomes more serious so as to not turn into a complete spoof, these touches do become less frequent. Still, the ones that are present, like Jiiva's announcement of an upcoming duet, do remind us that the filmmakers aren't taking things too seriously and we aren't supposed to either.

Its a good thing that the movie takes this approach because there's nothing new or fresh about the story itself. The story moves forward with sequences cobbled together from many different movies and there's not a shred of originality to be found anywhere. If Poonam's fear of Chakravarthy reminds us of Meera Jasmine's position in Run, Jiiva's MO of earning his confidence and conspiring against him from within his gang is what Nitin Satya did to destroy Prakashraj in Pandhayam. Even individual steps of Jiiva's plan are unoriginal as his birthday present to Poonam imitates Dhanush's gift to Shriya in Kutty.

The humor doesn't help overlook the same problem that Pandhayam ran into - making the villain look stupid. As Jiiva leads Chakravarthy along while romancing Poonam under his nose, Chakravarthy ends up looking rather dumb. While this can be attributed to him being blinded by his love for Poonam, the end result is that he doesn't put up much of a fight. So the fight between Jiiva and him ends up being quite one-sided and so, uninteresting. 'Kaadhal' Dhandapani is another suitor for Poonam but his segments are more effective since they are done with only comedy in mind and the end is pretty clever.

Though we can bemoan the fact that we've lost a good actor, we can't really fault Jiiva's performance here. He gets the tone right and is able to shift smoothly between the serious and the light-hearted portions. Poonam resembles Kiran quite a bit but has little to do apart from looking scared when Chakravarthy approaches her and dancing with Jiiva in the song sequences. Chakravarthy doesn't look as morose as he did in Sarvam and occasionally gets a few laughs with the fierceness of his love. Vadivelu goes through the usual routine of being in the wrong places at the wrong times and paying for that. Kadavule... manages to be catchy among the numbers in the otherwise generic soundtrack.