I wouldn’t say I was unemotional while watching the new Raghava Lawrence film Rudhran. I laughed seeing the action sequences, cried seeing the comedy, and got angry seeing the sentiments. Rudhran is Raghava Lawrence trying to be a mixture of Nandamuri Balakrishna and Rajinikanth, but what he succeeds is only giving the viewer a headache. With a story that uses zero imagination to walk away from familiar scripts, Rudhran insults everyone who expects something new or genuinely entertaining.
Rudhran is a software engineer. He has a loving father and mother, and he is in love with a girl named Ananya, who is an orphan. His happy life faced a major setback when his father died, and there was a huge debt that Rudhran had to tackle. Rudhran’s decision to go to London to earn more and how that decision changes his life with the entry of this bad guy named Bhoomi is what we see in the film Rudhran.
Rudhran is pretty much that movie they shot with a script written two days before the shoot. It is almost an unintentional tribute to the template mass masala film. The movie begins with the establishment of the bad guy in the most cliched manner. Then it goes for the introduction of the hero, who pops up out of the blue to rescue a helpless female doctor from a group of gangsters. The hero-worshipping is also done by the folks who want to kill him. Then the movie slips into that flashback portion, another classic template of trashy humor, toxic romance, and cringe-inducing sentiments.
One of the most hilarious things about the movie was the backstory of the bad guy. He is like this millionaire gangster, and he has achieved all that by killing the parents of the people who relocated abroad. At the film’s end, our hero speaks at a felicitation ceremony and begs everyone to take care of their parents, almost like the message of this movie. Looking at the construction of the antagonist and this message, I just wondered what they all smoked before the shoot to think that it was enough to hold the audience’s interest. Looking at the interview sequence, it was apparent that writer Thirumaran had no clue about how the techie world functions.
The songs popped out of nowhere without any purpose, and since it was Lawrence, even the climax fight sequence was a dance number. The fight choreography shows some bizarre imaginations that were supposed to enhance the swagger but ended up being funny. I think the brief to editor Anthony from director Kathiresan was to chop it like a Hari film. He ensures there is at least a pointless flash on the screen every 5 seconds. The lack of budget was evident in the green screen London sequences. Sam CS delivers a deafening and generic background score yet again.
Like I said in the beginning, Raghava Lawrence is trying to imitate the style of someone like Rajinikanth, and he and the director are not bothered whether the swagger suits the situation in the story. He pulls off every emotion on a pitch that feels higher than the required. Sarathkumar, as the villain, became a joke piece in the final act when he performed Bhoomi Aattam against Lawrence’s Rudhra Thandavam (Remembering Ilavarasu’s dialogue delivery at this point with a giggle). Priya Bhavani Shankar as Ananya is that typical Tamil heroine who buys chocolates for street kids, which impresses the Romeo hero. Poornima Bhagyaraj and Nassar played the roles of the parents, while Kaali Venkat performed the part of the hero’s friend.
The theater from which I watched the movie had a small Tamil audience who were actually laughing at all the skit jokes in the first half of the film. When the movie ended with the announcement of Rudhran 2, even those folks were like, “We couldn’t even bear this one.” You can have RD Rajashekhar as your cinematographer, Anthony as your editor, and GV Prakash Kumar as your music director. But if the script is terrible, none of those above-mentioned names will be able to fix that mess.
With a story that uses zero imagination to walk away from familiar scripts, Rudhran insults everyone who expects something new or genuinely entertaining.
Signal
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended