SURYAPAARVAI
A movie review by Balaji Balasubramaniam
| Cast: | Arjun, Pooja, Raghuvaran, Radharavi, Koundamani, Senthil, Chinni Jayanth, Alphonso |
| Music: | S.A.Rajkumar |
| Direction: | Jagan |
Suryapaarvai is based on the Hollywood movie The Professional down to the point of aping the hero's costume and glasses for Arjun. The only difference is that the heroine in the English version was a rather young teenager. Understandably, the director opts for a much more grown woman for the role. With the girl directing unmistakably romantic overtures towards the much older protagonist, a young actress might have been unacceptable to tamil audiences. Not that the change did much good anyway! The movie obviously did not make any kind of noise at the box office since I hadn't even heard of it till I saw it on the video rental shelves.
Vijay(Arjun) is an assassin for hire who works exclusively for Sundaramurthy(Radharavi). A man of few words, he is a "magnet who sees and remembers everything" and a "mercury who doesn't get attached to anybody". Next door to him is a rather unhappy family where the kid is ill-treated by his father, stepmother and stepsister. The kid's sister Pooja(Pooja) visits for the holidays. She is a talkative and playful girl who tries her best to get Vijay to say atleast a few words but not with much success. The girl's father has cheated Jayanth(Raghuvaran), a corrupt official in the narcotics bureau and he arrives to extract revenge. During the bloody encounter, everyone is killed including Pooja's brother. She seeks asylum with Vijay and itching to avenge her kid brother's death, asks him to teach her to shoot. Gradually, Vijay too gets attached to her.
As the story suggests, this is a rather violent movie. The bodycount is one of the highest I remember seeing in tamil movies (A young boy is also killed, something rarely shown in Indian movies). The movie begins and ends with Arjun single-handedly mowing down a huge gang of bad guys. There are plenty of other bloody shootouts too and violence reigns. In this respect it is kind of like a John Woo movie, but with very little of the style of the Hong Kong director.
The relation between Arjun and Pooja, the centerpiece of the movie, is nicely handled. Her feelings for him range from friendship to romantic interest while he seems to view the relationship mainly as one between a mentor and his protege. The scene where she reveals her feelings for him is a nice scene and Arjun's reaction and response are natural and sensible. But Arjun's flashback explaining why he became a killer-for-hire isn't coherent and contains lots of unexplained holes.
The movie completely falls apart in the climax. Arjun and Pooja, who are in the city, go down to enter a place that looks like a cave. Raghuvaran's ideas to bring him out include sending in his gunmen in small groups and later, flushing him out (literally!) by filling the cave with water. Arjun's escape from here is rather ridiculous and the climax itself is right out of the book of "impossible things that can happen only in movies". The final ending is also unacceptable. I can think of atleast two other endings which would've been more logical.
The comedy track of Koundamani and Senthil occupies almost half the movie. Worse, since it is unrelated to the main story, it almost overwhelms it. To be fair, I did laugh at more than one place as Senthil gradually puts Koundamani into increasingly dangerous situations (the sequence where Koundamani gets caught while holding Senthil's briefcase which turns out to be full of drugs, for instance) but the comedy sequences occur so frequently as to make us lose track of the main storyline. This overreliance on comedy only serves to illustrate the director's lack of confidence in sustaining the audience's interest with his principle story.
Arjun play the silent killer well enough but with all the gunfights, there are no real stunts for him. Pooja is a bad pick. She looks really bad and doesn't act well either. Raghuvaran is the perfect villain. But his actions are too over-the-top and careless considering that he is an official in the bureau. Anyone who behaves like him would be first on my list of suspects. Radharavi has a nice character and he excels during the personal talk with Raghuvaran. Alphonso, usually on for just a dance, has a bigger role as the other woman pining silently for Arjun.