Thalaiva, After Annaatthe It’s Time To Take A  Break

Annaatthe

Rating: *

Annaatthe Movie Review: When  it’s Rajinikanth  the  rest of the  cast doesn’t matter.  It should, though.  Now the  time has come for  the  Thalaiva  to  re-asssess his career. His attempts to stay  eternally  youthful  are  not  working.

After  a series of underwhelming  releases(and that’s an understatement)  Rajinikanth Sir is back with a sir-dard  of a film.Sitting through the  lengthy loud loutish  torture chamber  of  a film with Tamilian fans  of  the Godstar shrieking  his name out, as  if HE can hear them, requires herculean  levels of selfloathing.

Sorry to say,  Thalaiva can’t hear  the voice within which is telling  him to STOP. Right now! It isn’t only  because he  looks way too old to play  Keerthi Suresh’s sister and  Nayanthara’s boyfriend. That IS  a big problem,I admit. But the  bigger problem is, Rajini Sir insists on working with  directors who are too much in awe of him to direct him.

Resultantly  in Annaatthe he keeps going off track with his  improvisations which once upon a time were so  spot-on they  drove the audience  wild. Now  it’s just embarrassing, nothing else, watching the mighty Rajinikanth  trying to look ….what?…45… when he is over 70 and spewing  lines that  spill out  in a wildspin  of senseless  gallery-wooing.

The  overall portrait is  that  of an  over-the-hill aged  superstar  trying  in vain to  preserve  the  illusion of  youth by working with  much younger co-stars.It  is painful to watch actresses as strong-willed as Keerthy Suresh(National award winner  for Mahanti) and Nayanthra (known in Tamil cinema as  ‘Lady Superstar) reduced to helpless props, nodding to every  whim and fancy of  their Lord, Master & Masterblatser.

As  a brother and  as  a  lover Rajinikanth  plays the autocratic patriarch who  “allows” his  dear kid-sister to study on Kolkata. GF Nayanthara  is a  lawyer by profession.She can barely open her mouth in the fear of being taken to task for contempt of  courtliness. I don’t know  if it’s a good thing. But the  all-powerful Patriarch hardly has  screen-time for the two ladies, as the  drama  moves to Kolkata where we  meet villain Jagpati Babu and his  son  played  by Abhimanyu Singh(who is also in this week’s Sooryavanshi, and nothing to be  proud of).

The  duo strikes more dreariness  than dread  in the drama, bringing into the plot the kind of outdated  villainy that even the 1980s would reject as juvenile.

Annaatthe is the story of a man   who would  go to any lengths to protect his sister  from the evil eye. But what  about the  lurking imminent danger  of  self-caricatural redundancy which  has overtaken  Rajinikanth’s career? Who will protect him from the evil eye?