Yaman
Direction: Jeeva Shankar
Cast: Vijay Antony, Miya George, Thiagarajan
Rating: 1/5
At times like these when the world is wracked by terror and violence, Tamil cinema goes merrymaking with sickle dance and bloodshed. And not just this, the fight sequences are set to music – with drums and other instruments freely used – and choreographed in a way to convey that end is paramount, whichever be the road to it. And director Jeeva Shankar ropes in Vijay Antony to play an ordinary citizen, Tamizharasan in Yaman or Lord of Death.
Used as a pawn by two rival politicians, Karunakaran and Pandian (who had once murdered Tamizharasan’s father in cold blood), Tamizharasan could put to shame Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes put together. Such is our hero’s intuitiveness and cunning that he smells his enemies – who are in their dozens – in the most unlikely of places, including a jail and a bar in a movie whose plot is boringly similar to Kamal Haasan’s Sathya and Subramaniapuram among several others.
If plot novelty takes a beating here, the writing is poor and scripting poorer with Shankar turning Tamizharasan literally into a Yaman, whose dance of death smacks of eeriness and unexplained evil. As I watched the film, I was wondering why Tamizharasan should degenerate into such a vengeful man, especially when he remains in the dark about his father’s killer.
If writer Shankar’s motive was to highlight the filth in the Indian political system with its share of treachery and corruption (look at the way a top cop accepts a bribe to let a bar operate without any hassles), the movie looks awfully exaggerated and unrealistic. Is Shankar wanting to tell us that politics is nothing but a huge cauldron of garbage that men like Karunakaran and Pandian take pleasure in filling.
Honestly, if the idea was to slot Antony’s Tamizharasan as some kind of a guardian angel, some kind of a saviour, Yaman does not work. . The man kills – or very cleverly gets others to do his dirty work. His hands, by and large, remain unsoiled – probably a ploy to airbrush Tamizharasan’s villainous image , to get a little white into the black.
A bit of romance between Mia George’s Archana (an actress) and Tamizharasan perhaps as a “relief” to all this gore sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. There is zero chemistry between them, and Antony looks visibly ill at ease as the lover-boy.
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