Vishwaroopam (Tamil)

Confucius says, “People who live in glass houses, should undress in the dark”.  He also says, “Man with forked tongue should not kiss balloon”.  Aaah what am I doing.  I am probably making an ass of myself just like one of the finest actors in Indian cinema.  The worry is that he will be making the same mistake again – about 2 years from now.  A fact that is made amply clear at the end of Vishwaroopam.

The 3 hour ordeal of watching one of my favourite actors making a fool of himself starts with a Kathak Class somewhere in New York City where he is teaching 6-7 girls to perform Kathak to a Tamil song.  Erm.  Haven’t we got the co-ordinates a little bit wrong here? And he is looking as gay as anyone can (I would like to clarify that I am not homophobic but it was just not required to go overboard).

 

Now his wife – Mrs. Nirupama Vishwanathan (which would make our hero Mr. Vishwanathan) is a hot woman (Pooja Kumar) who can barely lip sync in Tamil – is planning to get a divorce because she suspects something wrong with our man.  Much worse, she even looks old enough to be his daughter (which she is pretty much as a matter of fact). 

 

So she sends a private dick after our man who by then has played host to his maternal uncle and an American friend Dawkins (Miles Anderson) and one of his students Ashmita (Andrea Jeremiah).  Private dick figures out that our hero is not a TamBram boy but a Tam Muslim guy.  Jesus!!! (did I just add another religion to the fray?)

 

Anyways, hero manages to lose Private dick but latter gets caught in some warehouse from where news about him snooping is passed on to a one eyed terrorist looking guy called Omar (Rahul Bose).  He senses something wrong and asks for more investigation.  Hero and wife get taken in by terrorists.  A few mins later, just as Omar realizes who hero is, carnage ensues and true face of hero comes to the fore.

 

I do not have a problem with people from this part of the world attempting the espionage genre.  The problem is that they make it into one random masala flick while attempting a serious espionage thriller.  And they just make a joke out of the finishing.  One of the reasons that I liked Agent Vinod was that while it was a masala movie, it was finished well.

 

About 2 years back I had mentioned Pooja Kumar in a review (one of my favourite pieces of writing) of Anjaana Anjaani.  I had mentioned that she was the otherwise saving grace in a disaster of a movie.  I had also recommended some touch up in the acting department.  A pity that Ms. Kumar doesn’t read my reviews and hence has gone south (literally and figuratively) in terms of her acting (or should I say, the lack of it).

 

Whats worse than that? The fact that 3 great actors – Kamal Hassan, Rahul Bose and Shekhar Kapur could not inspire the rest of the cast to come up with something worth looking at.  Everything about Vishwaroopam was disappointing.  Badly edited – nearly 3 hours!!! At least 30 mins could have been cut.  Cinematography – all green screen shots looked like green screen shots (chipkaoed or stuck).

 

The story was random and the screenplay made it even worse.  Most of the dialogues – and I was hoping that the Tamil version had good dialogues – were slapstick at best.  Casting disasters strewn all over.  For what its worth, the only person who seemed to have put in an effort was Rahul Bose – and he has dubbed himself which is great.  The only saving grace – better than RA One.  Not the worst of the year.  3 on 10.

 

Trailer on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l2nlFQ3X8M