Yennai Arindhaal (*ing Ajith Kumar, dir. Gautam Menon)

Full trailer

I had trouble getting this to play online, and did not get to see the final confrontation between the hero and the villain (although I gather from wikipedia and the general nature of the film that the good guys win and live happily ever after). I also didn't have subtitles, although that might have been just as well in some ways (Baradwaj Rangan's review quotes Ajith's character as making oblique jokes about having to stock up on condoms to insure that he and Anushka don't have kids, which invokes mental images I could do without, thank you.)

The film's definitely good value for money: you get a bromance-gone-sour between undercover cop Sathyadev (Ajith Kumar) and the swashbuckling but evil prettyboy Victor; a truly disturbing crime story about organ theft; a sweet, lightly sketched romance between Ajith and Trisha; a quirky-cute (and even more lightly sketched) romance between Ajith and Anushka; some charming but eerie (and very very brief) romantic bits between Victor and his lovely wife and partner in crime, Lisa; some cute family drama between Ajith and his adopted daughter; some pretty good and moderately realistic action scenes; a few decent songs with mediocre but pleasant picturizations; and some comic sidekicks who aren't annoying for once.

The cast does well. The child actress is cute and emotes well. Trisha is charming and looks more like Jane Seymour than ever. Anushka does well with what she is given: she has very little screen time and is basically playing an upper-middle-class version of the standard masala heroine-it was all too easy to imagine Sonakshi Sinha doing this role in a hypothetical remake opposite Salman/Akshay. Ajith is suave towards Anushka's flaky young heroine in the present, shyer and more bashful around Trisha (whom he met and fell in love with in flashbacks when he was younger), macho and menacing towards the villains, gentle and fatherly towards the daughter. This is the kind of role men his age should be playing, both in Kollywood and in Bollywood: a man of strength and experience who is respectful and charming towards women, kind to children and people in trouble, a holy terror to bad men and women. The decision to present Victor and Lisa as glamorous, charming people (the actors are arguably better dressed and more attractive than Ajith/Anushka/Trisha) is a clever one that ties in well with the logistics of the organ theft angle. I didn't find Lisa quite menacing enough for some of her scenes but she did well otherwise.

If it has a failing, aside from the picturizations and TMI tendencies about the hero's love life, it's that the structure is kind of scattershot, even for a Gautam Menon film possessed of Gautam Menon's usual tendency to montage his way through plot points the audience might prefer him to dig into with actual scenes. Victor drops out of the plot for a long stretch, Anushka's character drops out of it for an even longer stretch, and a tense scene towards the end where Ajith's character confronts Lisa, who is holding his daughter hostage, is shown (as best I could tell; this was around the point where einthusan crapped out on me) in a kind of flashback montage...from the POV of Victor, who wasn't even there. There's also a thoroughly pointless flashback about Ajith's father's death, which motivates his then-teenaged/pre-teen son to become a cop. Also the timescale is dodgy: the daughter goes from "about to be born" when Ajith first meets Trisha's pregnant character, to two or three when he first meets the two of them again, to like eight or nine when he and Trisha are about to get married, and then she largely stops aging while Ajith goes from black-haired to almost completely gray over the course of a song montage.

Basically this is a pretty good combination of action movie and family drama that didn't aggravate me as much as Gautam's Kaakha Kaakha did, and treats its hero and its heroines in a fairly dignified way. It is certainly worth your time if you like the director's work in general, or Ajith's, or Trisha's. But there are some speed bumps along the way that keep it from being as awesome as it could be.