It is hard to believe that the great filmmaker Vetrimaaran has written the story for the Tamil film Garudan. This hodgepodge of religion and politics is unbearably stilted and overcooked. The jaw-dropping plot tries to cram in a violent fusion of religion and politics, with elements of a family drama also peeping out of the corners like a badly wrapped gift.
It takes a lot of effort to achieve this kind of chaos and mediocrity in the guise of a massy entertainer. Writer-director R. S. Durai Senthilkumar takes Vetrimaaran’s story and turns it into a hot mess.
There are truckloads of characters pored into the plot, maybe as distraction from the aridity of any halfway decent themes and ideas. From what I could make out of the mindboggling pandemonium, the central character is Sokkan an orphan who is given a home by a kindly financially privileged woman with two grandsons Aadhi and Karuna played with stilted theatricality by M. Sasikumar and Unni Mukundan.
Aadhi , Karuna and Sokan grown up as brothers, singing, dancing, fighting,bantering. But Sokan’s status as the outsider who is constantly reminded of where came from, begins to take a toll on the family ties that bind the trio of protagonists.
A temple trust issue is thrust into the plot with as much violence as the plot favours. Every character is shown to be raging and venting spleen. The prolonged tension is eased with bouts of comic relief that seem oddly at loggerheads with what the writer-director had hoped to achieve.
In one early “comic” episode a girl’s accidental pregnancy becomes cause for laughter.
Actor Soori who has his roots in comedy tries to balance out the haphazard tonal shifts in the plot with his genial presence.But the film fails to achieve any balance between its huffing characters and puffing narration.
While the quintessential puerility of the plot could be condoned as a commercial compromise, the jumbled anarchic tone of narration and one-note characters are quite simply inexcusable and exhausting. The relationship among the three “brothers” is shown to be troubled from the start. And that is fine. But the class dynamics which define the relationship are never resolved.
Buried under the rubble of bedlam is a powerful story of internecine wars and how religion and politics make strained bedfellows. But for that story to be told with lucidity , we needed a better director. Garudan is in so much hurry to keep the audiences engaged, it loses its steps and never recovers.