Ajith’s Vidaamuyarchi Creates Suspenseful  Strife  On A  Missing Wife 

Ajith’s Vidaamuyarchi  Creates Suspenseful  Strife  On A  Missing Wife 

Rating: **

   Ajith Kumar who loves racing cars,  chooses a fast-paced road  movie as his 62^nd  starrer. Magizh Thirumen’s   Vidaamuyarchi  , with its  wife-lost-in-a-foreign-country theme , sounds quite like the edge-of-the-seat treat that we  all need when the weekend is weakened.

     Sorry to say, Vidaamuyarchi  is  that little  boy  who tries to get attention by repeatedly holding his sleeping father’s  face  and prying  open his eyes. This is a film that is desperate to please. The script adapted  from a terrible  1997  Kurt Russell thriller(an aside: why remake  a terrible 28-year old  film?) is  about a  man trying to  search for his missing wife in a foreign  country.

Azerbaijani  never  looked less inviting, as Arjun(Ajith Kumar) makes a frantic  effort to find his wife Kayal(Trishna  Krishnan, looking frail and distressed even she is  not meant to be). The screenplay emits the  fumes of frantic manipulation, takes us on a whirlwind road trip to a hostile hinterland.

   As the screenplay progresses  it gets progressively  tedious to watch Ajith tilting sword at windmills, in a manner  of speaking. There is  no end to the wheels within wheels. Like one of those Japanese dolls, the  suspense that comes out layer after layer gets smaller and smaller.

And the smaller it gets, the more noise  the  storytelling makes. The plot point when Arjun takes off for  a road  trip with his sullen wife, secretly hoping to mend their broken marriage, is the  only time when the writing stops becoming pushy and  gets kosher . This is when the couple encounters  a bunch of hooligans. Arjun begs  off saying he is  not inclined to get into a  fight. We  come to  understand that Arjun is not  the typical Tamilian screen hero.  Imagine if Rajinikanth’s screen-wife went missing!

    There is hell to pay in Vidaamuyarchi, but not of the super-heroic dimensions. Ajith keeps his character under firm  restraining order. There is  no larger-than-life fights except on in  a car crammed with miscreants where Arjun loses it.  That apart,Arjun is often outsmarted  by his  evil avaricious enemies Rakshit and Deepika. The couple from hell is played by  Arjun Sarja  and Regina  Cassandra  as  closeted psychopaths, outwardly normal. But wait till the script peels of their  surface civility. They are a pair on a  rampage.

   Sadly the  script doesn’t favour any breathing  space. It keeps rushing the characters into sticky situations which are as messy on paper as  on screen. However this insipid thriller is not devoid of plus points. The  film is fetchingly shot in the desertland, with the frames conveying a certain clenched aesthetic wherein the mood of dread is  never obviated.

 Among the actors only Ajith seems concerned about being in  character. His wizened  beard and the  gait of a  middle aged man (at one point he tells his wife  about the hooligans that they have “young blood”) go a long way into authenticating the road movie. Among the rest of the cast Regina Cassandra’s bad girl act  reminded me of  the little girl who wants to hijack the attention that the little  boy at the  start of the review, corners by forcing his father’s attention.