Kodiveeran - Few stretches pack a punch but middling overall!!!

Bharath Vijayakumar

Kutti Puli, Komban and Marudhu – So you pretty much know the kind of film you are going to watch as you step into Muthaiya's Kodiveeran. The trailers reinforced the same. Hence everything has been laid out to meter your expectation. The only question at this point would be about the engagement quotient and Kodiveeran does a decent job in this front.

Plot: 

If Karthi had to safeguard his father-in-law in Komban here it is Sasikumar who needs to step in for his brother-in-law.

Kodiveeran starts off with a rather uncomfortable (not sure if gory is the word) scene. It is not violence in the traditional sense but something that involves a suicide. You sort of squirm in your seats. None of the violence and bloodshed that is going to follow comes anywhere close to this initial scene as Kodiveeran settles into a relatively harmless rural masala in contrast to what the first scene had in store for us.

Sasikumar repeats what he has been doing consistently on screen. The supporting cast does well. On the surface you might think that there is nothing impressive about the actors. But most of the time the difference between whether such predictable films work or not depends a lot on the performance of the actors. The way the characters behave in a lot of these films would look over the top and melodramatic. But in Muthaiya's films though we might get irritated with the outdated melodrama, his actors always put in a certain performance (or he extracts it from them) that we buy into their decisions atleast momentarily.

The film gets progressively better and there is this stretch where the hero and his sister try to get a partner for each other and this culminates in a rather high octane interval block. Again there is nothing great that is happening but things are kept quite interesting. That is why we think that some inventiveness in the screenplay and Muthaiya might be quite capable of delivering better products. Too many convenient decisions in the second half and the film settles into the watchable category. In once scene someone advices Pasupathy that he needs to hold back as he might get into trouble with the law and he agrees. Few scenes later he murders a character in broad daylight. How things are going to end is a given but is it too much to ask for a little more thought in ensuring that the events look plausible? The same goes for the songs and the action sequences. Hummable tunes and some innovativeness in action is all that we need in these films.

Bottomline: 

Muthaiya follows his template to a T and the result is a watchable rustic actioner, the sort of film that lies exactly on the threshold limit of tolerance.

Rating: 2.5/5