After years of struggling to be accepted as a saleable hero in Tamil cinema, Arun Vijay finally found success with 2009's Malai Malai. So it is not surprising that he has rejoined with the same team and resorted to the same formula for his next film Maanja Velu. While the formula is old and familiar, the team has done a better job this time around with some minor tweaks to the screenplay ensuring that the film itself is more well-paced and entertaining.

Velu(Arun Vijay) has made a habit out of helping his college friends by setting up businesses for them. His dad(Vijayakumar), a television reporter, isn't too happy about this. He has no such problems with his older son Subash Chandra Bose(Karthik), who is the ACP in Tiruchi. Umapathy(Chandrasekhar) is the most ruthless and powerful dada in town and bringing him down becomes Bose's main job. Meanwhile Velu falls for Anjali(Dhansika), his collegemate, but her dad isn't too happy about this.

Its not just that the formula is the same, director Venkatesh even resorts to the same trajectory he used in Malai Malai for the storyline. So we first get a happy family for the hero, a villain with good connections, some key events that make the hero clash with the bad guy and an overload of sentiments - brought about by a similar happening - towards the end.

But within this familiar trajectory, the director manages to keep things interesting with a screenplay that has contains some small surprises and twists at regular intervals. A case in point is the sequence where Karthik nabs one of Chandrasekhar's men. While the happenings - Karthik arrests Chandrasekhar and he gets off because of his connections - are familiar the actual proceedings, like the way an earlier casual comment about car thefts is used or the reason behind the stop at the teashop, make the entire sequence quite racy. Similarly, the role played by Arun's inventor friend is a nice twist and it has also been employed well to move the story forward.

The college canteen set up by Arun Vijay for Santhanam is simply a prop for the comedy track. The track actually attempts to tell a story instead of being a collection of disconnected incidents but it fails in its most important objective - being funny - for the most part. The initial scenes involving Arun's family - especially those that form the foundation for the Arun-Anjali romance - raise more laughs with the camaraderie between them and some nice comments(like the one about Anu Hassan's TV personality). But the comedy track does finish strongly with a clever and funny take on the kidnapping scene from Nadodigal.

Following director Venkatesh's route, Arun Vijay also does whatever he did in Malai Malai, focusing on the action sequences but managing to handle the comedy and sentiment scenes capably. Dhansika does the usual heroine's job of hanging around for the romance portions and then disappearing as action comes to the forefront. Karthik makes a good comeback. His trademark dialog delivery isn't as irritating as before probably because of the long break and he has a likeable character. Chandrasekhar is not the first choice we'd think of for the bad guy but he does the needful even if he doesn't do anything different or new.