Friday, November 1, 2013

Review: Aarambam (2013)


Probably one of the biggest year end releases in Tamil cinema and with multiple star power Aarambam created sky high hype and to add to it the distributors/theatre owners decided to screen innumerable shows in Chennai. Imagine 91 shows for a movie in just one multiplex. Totally Insane!

Getting straight to the point, as expected, Aarambam did not live up to that hype. The movie had a lot of potential. The first half was very exciting and for a change I thought that I would give a good rating to this movie. But a boring and dull second half left me un-engaged and think of other things during the show.

If I had to point out one best thing in the movie, it would be the cinematography. It was stunning and world class. Om Prakash needs a pat on the back for taking us through some amazing and never before seen visuals and camera angles. Apart from this, if something scored, then it was surely Ajith. He pulls it off with ease and class.

All the other departments failed. Editing was below par, songs were totally unhearable (better to hear just the background music - Young tamizhachi was a good and stylishly shot number but with a straight rip off party prelude), acting by others were passable, graphics were very amateurish.

Arya makes a fun of himself throughout the movie, Nayantara follows his path. Tapasee, on the other hand, was cute in certain areas and her delivery was different from the others. Rana Daggubati was utterly useless. No scope for him.

None of them in the cast knew how to dance. Choreography was like aerobics. 

At a high level, the film looks like a stylish hollywood flick but frequent hiccups in the screenplay, logical fallacies and other minor errors brings down the overall quality of the movie to a level lower than expected.

For a movie of this scale, errors like "using mouse on a non-clicking interface", "tamil dubbing characters starting to talk directly in tamil" and "location errors" should have definitely been avoided. Also, the director could have avoided a lame joke on Ajith's namesake enemy Vijay by not letting a Vijay look-alike come and do some unwanted gimmicks in one of the scenes which involved the character coming out of a theatre playing Rajini's Sivaiji.

To sum it up, I would say Arrambam is not that bad it does have its own ways to work, but the negatives along with a cliched storyline lets down the viewer. After a decent first half, I began to think if this is one of the best Ajith flicks in my list but at the end this thought ends up in the trash.

A swing and a miss is Aarambam but still is definitely better than Billa 2. Watch if you want to have some timepass and definitely watch if you are an Ajith fan.

Rating: 2.5/5

Aarambam: Could have actually made it simple!

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