Tamilarasan 2023 Movie Review
Director: Babu Yogeswaran
Cast: Vijay Antony, Suresh Gopi, Sonu Sood, and Remya Nambeesan
Cinematography: R. D. Rajasekhar
Music: Ilaiyaraaja
Editing: A. L. Ramesh & Bhuvan Srinivasan
Synopsis:
An honest police officer gets into a conflict with Rana. Their enmity worsens when Tamilarasan refuses to obey Rana’s order in a critical situation.
Tamilarasan 2023 Movie Review:
Tamilarasan (Vijay Antony) is a cop, of the bleeding heart kind. He and his loving wife Leena (Ramya Nambeesan) receive the shock of their lives when they learn that their son Prabhakar (Pranav Mohan) has a weak heart and the sooner they go for a transplant the better.
They get him admitted to a hospital, which, unfortunately, cares more about profits and is filled with cold-blooded administrators and stone-hearted doctors. With a minister, too, in need of a heart, poor Prabhakar becomes low- a priority for the hospital.
An enraged Tamilarasan decides to take their heart specialist Dr. Muruganantham (Suresh Gopi) hostage and force them to treat his son first. Can he save his son, especially with his corrupt superior Rana Pratap Singh (Sonu Sood), a man who already has a bone to pick with him, trying to put him down?
Tamilarasan is the kind of film that, even on paper feels like a patient in need of a medical miracle. The film’s writing is as haphazard as a doctor’s handwriting and its tone keeps shifting unevenly, like a patient’s fluctuating pulse.
How else can one explain the switch in tone between a scene where a boy is fighting for his life with a scene where Robo Shankar does his limp comedy by making a double entendre out of the word body?
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Giving him stiff competition is Yogi Babu, whose comedy involves rhyming mosam poiten with motion point. Like a pharmacist choosing to ignore a doctor’s prescription, the film does away with research on the subject of organ transplantation.
This approach only leads to scenes that are painfully melodramatic and unintentionally funny. If the idea was to expose medical corruption and greed in hospitals, we’ve already seen it all competently done in Ramana — 20 years ago!
And it has cops dealing with the hostage situation in such a laughable manner that makes the cops in Bhagyaraj’s Rudhra seem like efficient ones.
We also get an ensemble cast of experienced actors, like Suresh Gopi, Sangitha, Kasthuri, and Radha Ravi, but their performances are as clinical and devoid of emotion as nurses assisting a surgeon on an operation table.
Ramya Nambeesan, meanwhile, is left to do two things — romance Vijay Antony as if he’s Vijay Sethupathi in Sethupathi and act as a worried mother. And as the central character, Vijay Antony, as usual, is earnest, but beyond that, his performance is as stiff as an unresponsive patient.
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Babu Yogeswaran’s Tamilarasan is a film that’s filled with flaws, like a patient suffering from multiple medical issues, but there’s one complaint that you cannot lay against it… that it lacks heart.
For, in this film about a heart transplant, the characters seem to change hearts as conveniently as slipping out of a hospital gown. These emotional transformations are as sudden and unpredictable as cardiac arrest. Perhaps we should be grateful for such unintentional poeticism in a film with a weak pulse.
Verdict:
The film, like its lead actor, is sincere. It wants to be socially responsible, and tucks in references to the Thoothukudi shootout. It stays politically correct when it comes to talking about women.
But when the treatment is as old-fashioned as the songs that Ilaiyaraaja dishes out, it results in a movie-watching experience that is as boring as watching an IV drip.
