Crouching all this while, when Puli finally pounced, it turned out to be a dismissive snarl-and-hop action, with no menace or vigour. The first ten minutes give away the 154 minute long story, and it’s as simple as a one-man fight against a blue-eyed clan, ‘Vedhalam’ that has been terrorising his village.
Keeping up with mythical story trends, it’s that time of the year again, when babies come floating by the river in baskets looking for prospective parents. Director Chimbudevan doesn’t bother thinking any different.
Marudheeran (Vijay) needed a better reason to confront the ‘Vedhalams’; chopping off his father’s hand and slaying his sister just didn’t cut it. The final cue was when they abducted his wife. And therein begins the questionable quest of finding his wife and piercing through the invincibility of the Vedhalams.
To justify the 'fantasy' genre that the movie is slotted into, Vijay encounters a Lilliputian Kingdom, a giant turtle that spews wisdom among other things (strangely reminiscent of the giant toad in the Spanish dark fantasy film, Pan's Labyrinth), a little green frog that keeps extending its limbs to every which direction in a bid to guide them to the Vedhalam fort.
While these factors could have been made interesting, they relegate to the background, in the face of some dreary comic side track by Thambi Ramaiah and co.
To make things a little more dismal, one is strangely paraphrasing the Vijay-black panther combat with the sequence in Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om, where Shah Rukh Khan ruthlessly takes a dig at Tamizh cinema heroics by rotating a stuffed tiger around his head yelling “bad pussy cat”. Did we really need that? And in bad graphics too.
As for Vijay, forget those mythological stories where the protagonists are all about tantalizing abs and chiselled arms; he is a wisp-like child-man, trying be a video game hero, who looks like he pulled a facial muscle when at his fiery best. As much as we like his antics, in a period story they don't feature well, where his body language is the same old slap-tickle-wriggle combination. And to top it all, he has imbibed a series of slow drawls to lengthen his sentences that sound like a tractor running on gravel. The charm of this actor is completely given a miss, which is disheartening. His agility in movements is still top-notch, if that's any consolation.
As for the womenfolk, if in the first half, Shruthi Haasan opts for some native hip shake, in the second half, Hansika Motwani adds some belly dancing moves (probably some early Arabic migrant influences), and their jobs are done.
There's Sreedevi, yes. But why, we don't know. We know that this versatile actress can do a wonderful job at playing the 'evil' woman. In here though, you see the theatricals get the better of an actor, who has little to offer going by the bleak storyline.
Sudeep looked promising, but that phase ended soon enough.
The art direction of the movie, strangely, seems to have taken place in about 15 cents of land, where huts and small thatched houses seem to be repeating themselves. Nothing seems expansive in the movie, neither concept nor physical spaces, except for the Queen's amphitheater-like arena.
In all, with its unimpressive growls, Puli looks like it will zoom out into past tense in no time.
PS: Wonder if Ajith is laughing at the Vedhalams!
Rating: 1.5/5