Ezham Arivu

Cast: Surya, Shruti Hassan, Johnny Tri Nguyen Music: Harris Jeyaraj, Direction: A R Murugadoss

Here’s the quiz question: what is the most popular and influential Tamil film? At least in the last two decades? From which several derivatives were born, multiple inspirations were wrought, numerous variations spawn, the movie that still continues to impress and inspire hoards of new, upcoming and ambitious Tamil filmmakers. One clue: It’s an English film.

The character Dong Lee (Johhny Tri Nguyen)’s body language, character arc and development are unmistakably that of T-1000 liquid metal robot of The Terminator. Of course it has helped Murugadoss that even the motivation for this character is quite similar: sent on a mission to kill a girl who was bent on a scientific research that threatened to derail the bad guys’ operation. Instead of John Connor, the potential victim here is a twentysomething Tamil girl of genetic engineering background. The mention of ‘Tamil’ is important to the story, and also the performance of the actress.

Ezham Arivu has a clever premise from Murugadoss and an impressive effort by Suria. It starts off with a self-assured foundation, but never quite manages to elevate itself from the initial promise. Mind you, this criticism is not about the commercial compulsions faced by all the Indian directors. It’s not the enforced song set-pieces, not the romance angle necessitated by the lead characters or the mandatory comic side-kick and the love-failure song. Well, all these are there in Ezham Arivu and all these are jarring enough to upset your DNA structure. Still those are not the ones we would be apt to complain about because Murugadoss never makes any pretence of these aspects and, except not properly integrating these elements into the script, he hasn’t done any injustice. For that matter no director in the living memory has managed to integrate them as skilfully as Shankar did, so it would be futile to even make a mention of these issues.

There are two problems that actually present this dilemma. First is with resolution of the plot-tangles established in the first half. Within ten minutes into the second half, the viewer was able to resolve all of them themselves thereby making the entire second-half redundant. The facade of sci-fi elements notwithstanding, the movie’s final resolution is actually achieved by hand to hand combat and not with any scientific quick thinking. (Compare this with Endhiran where the final resolution, with all those noisy spectacles aside, was actually a clever geeky gesture by the scientist. Compare this even with Mangatha where the final revelation was pleasantly shocking.) It would be difficult to discuss the gaping holes of the story without revealing the spoilers, although many of them would be easily deductible to a seasoned and discerning viewer. It appeared like they needed more meetings during the screenplay stage. The classic mistake made by all our filmmakers. They think that a clever idea and a saleable star is enough to prop the entire movie.

The second is the propaganda element in the film. It is understandable that there’s a tinge of Tamil pride in the legend of Bodhi Dharma. But where is the Tamil victimhood in the story? Is the villain aiming to kill the scientist girl because she is a Tamil? Would he have spared her if she was a Telugu or a Bengali? And why link it with the Sri Lankan conflict? And why there’s such a lengthy lecture in the end? Aren’t Tamils prouder than any of our neighbours? Can any other race in India compete with our vanity? And for all that drivel on linguistic pride, why is Shruti Hassan talking in such an accented Tamil?