PULIVAAL MOVIE REVIEW

The promos of Pulivaal may draw the audience in under the pretext of being some sort of comedy drama but halfway through the film it’s soon evident that the subject is quite twisted. Nevertheless the real potential of the story achieves its peak only during the last lap of the film, which features a raw fight sequence choreographed by stunt master Rajasekhar and is nicely captured by cinematographer Bhojan K Dinesh.

Pulivaal is the story of two individuals, Vemal and Prasanna, from contrasting spectrums of society who, by a twist of fate, come to cross paths with each other. Vemal’s character finds an opportunity to gain leverage from the situation while he leaves Prasanna chasing only shadows.

In its essence the premise comes across as interesting but with both Vemal and Prasanna’s characters being flawed personalities, the audience is not given enough reason to root for either of them, let alone both. Traditionally, the audience tends to back the ones that are marginalized, Vemal in this case, but when they see him orchestrating retaliation by soaking someone in fresh cow dung, it’s hard to cheer for him. Prasanna’s character too has his own vices which don’t sit well for a traditional ‘hero’.

Clocking at just over 2 hours and 15 minutes, the actual plot of Pulivaal may amount to less than 100 minutes while the rest of the duration encourages excessive amount of fillers in the guise of comedy and songs. The story itself takes off just moments before the interval, but even its narration feels stretched like a mega-serial.

Vemal appears in plenty of unwanted scenes but in the crucial moments he performs aptly. Prasanna, as a suave businessman, comes across as underused, but he’s particularly impactful in the climax fight. Between the three heroines billed in the film (that includes Ananya and Iniya), Oviya has the most important part and she performs as per the role’s demands. Soori’s gag here is to memorize SMS jokes and reproduce them with ‘timing’ but you could only wish that he had picked some good jokes at that. Thambi Ramiah is again relegated to the comedy department but the story offers his character some sort of purpose in the end.

Two songs of NR Raghunanthan, one for each hero and his pair, are choreographed colorfully with heaps of dance moves thrown in for good measure. Gopi Sundar extracts melodies from the songs for his background score and he tries his best to raise the tension during the climax.

Written by Sameer Tahir for the original ‘Chappa Kurushu’, the idea of closure in this story is rather perplexing as you can’t but feel that a third person is being labeled a scapegoat for the misdeeds of the lead individuals.

Instead of dwelling on what Vemal’s character stands to gain from his leverage or providing Prassana with an investigative angle, director Marimuthu allows the plot play out like a game with lifeless thrills, and whenever he does manage to build suspense he breaks it down with narratives that are tangential to the story.