Star Cast: Ajith Kumar, Manju Warrier, Bagavathi Perumal, Mohanan Sundaram
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Director: H Vinoth
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What’s Bad: A day before watching this film, one of my ears stopped hearing anything going deaf and now I know why!
Loo Break: Second half is a land of opportunities
Watch or Not?: Only if you can watch a film just because of one hero!
Language: Text
Available On: Theatrical Release
Runtime: 145 Minutes
User Rating:
Post a hurried & abrupt explanation as to why a Bank named ‘Your Bank’ has to be looted for 500 crores by a group of professional gangsters. They face the ‘Dark Devil’ inside the bank who’s also there to loot the bank but for 2,000 crores (because he’s Thala Ajith & the lead actor won’t loot the same amount as petty sidekicks).
Darkdevil puppets the gangsters to his tunes & is one step ahead of the police force outside the bank as well. How the second half remodels itself into a ‘social message’ film from being a broody dark-humour heist thriller is where the rest of the story unfolds.
H. Vinoth’s story had such a strong potential to be a crackling one throughout but suffers from the second-half syndrome of letting a tight pace go all haywire. Things just happen for the sake of giving closure to the already-dragged narrative. The story is exactly like The Office‘s iconic dialogue: “Sometimes start a sentence, and don’t even know where it’s going. just hope find it along the way.”
Nirav Shah’s cinematography captures the ‘fan-service’ portions of the film with style but doesn’t really do much apart from that keeping things extremely basic. The action, on which the entire film capitalised, isn’t as great as one would hope for. The slo-mo sequences are too slow to even talk about most of them.
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Similar to Pongal 2023’s other release, Varisu, even Thunivu falls victim to the same complaint of relying too much on your lead i.e. Ajith Kumar in this case. We totally understand fans are going to see their favourite star on the big screen, but they want more than that. Thala Ajith roaring like a tiger & even moonwalking like Michael Jackson would’ve been accepted if the story around it would’ve been written stronger.
Manju Warrier restricts herself to playing the mysterious role of female presence in Ajith’s Darkdevil’s life. Unfortunately, she couldn’t rise more than that despite having all the scope of her character being written with a spin-off twist. Bagavathi Perumal as Anthony brings in a few laughs here and there, along with Mohanan Sundaram who plays the role of a journalist Mai Pa.
As a filmmaker, if you’re on a course to make a bank-heist film, you will take a good portion in the first half to explain the ‘WHY?’ part of the planned robbery. But, H Vinoth decides to take the entire film by injecting little pieces of information about why the heist was actually planned. His attempt at genre-jumping from first half to the second half doesn’t really give any fruitful returns.
Ghibran’s music fails to match the level of swag enamored by Thala Ajith. Apart from asking “Who’s da gangsta?” in a track, Thala doesn’t get a single tune to link his character with.
All said and done, despite Thala Ajith’s a little exaggerated and gutsy performance, makers fail to cash in on the proper story by falling into their own cliched tropes of ‘masala’ cinem a.
Two and a half stars!
Thunivu releases on 11th January, 2023.
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