Vadham - An effective and 'massy' offering in the web series format!
Bharath Vijayakumar
One way to look at Venkatesh Babu's Vadham is that it is your typical mass template offering of the good vs evil battle. As much as it is typical, Vadham is also different in so many small but important ways. The most obvious is that a female lead is the one doing all the punching. While Vadham almost plays out like a movie with just over 3 hrs of runtime, the webseries format with extremely crisp episodes ( each episode is hardly 20 mins if you leave out the credits) works in its favour.
Plot : Just when Sakthi (Shruthi Hariharan), a young cop who is unable to digest the corruption plaguing her department, decides to quit, she is put in charge of investigating a high profile murder case.
Vadham works because it keeps things simple. The writing is neat and we have characters whom we care for. Sruthi Hariharan is solid as the protagonist and plays the quintessential 'mass' hero(ine) with a certain assurance. This is an understated performance but also one which convincingly conveys the emotions. The action sequences never go overboard and despite the cinematic liberties, they sort of remain within the threshold of believability. There is a certain amateurishness in these action sequences but given the complacency in some of the big budget star vehicles that we are used to, these shortcomings are really small in comparison.
Most of our mainstream cop films almost always glorify police brutality. For most of Vadham, it stays on the right side of ethics and morality. Towards the closing episodes, the protagonist does falter but even then there is atleast an effort to have dialogues that convey that what was done wasn't exactly the right thing to do.
The emotions work in Vadham and it keeps surprising us with how it gets most of the basic things right. There is a healthy romantic relationship between two equal partners. Their parents may have certain reservations about their relationship or some of their decisions but everyone respects the freedom of each other. A transgender character is an important part of the narrative and is treated as just another character without the customary 'See, we are being politically correct!' kind of attitude from the makers.
Bottomline:
Vadham is unfussy, effective and delivers the goods.
Rating: 3/5
Streaming on MX player