The cast includes Karunas, Rajendran, Sriman, Riyaz Khan, Samuthirakani and Radhakrishnan Parthiban - all of them underutilised. But maybe there are too many characters to begin caring about. (Suriya plays a second role as well.) It’s a pity that the screenplay has spent so much time fooling around instead of imbuing the characters with depth and dimension, because this stretch could have really been something, had we been emotionally involved with their plight. Venkat Prabhu may like to think he’s a prankster, but his film works best when he hunkers down to deliver hardcore drama, with a paranormal twist on Aboorva Sagodharargal. It’s only in the last hour or so that Massu begins to score. When watching an innings from Scotland, you have to be happy with the occasional single. Of course, it helps if you stop thinking about things like writing and execution. These scenes are still badly staged, and the tone is all over the place - but at least there’s a sense of things going somewhere. Right now, the film is just warming up.īut when the supernatural element kicks in, there’s finally something to hold on to. A commissioner is killed by someone… But who and why? All that will have to wait. There’s another attempt at a joke when an overweight woman is referred to as Kung Fu Panda. There’s an attempt at a joke about the composer S. If you’d asked me, early on, what was happening, I’d have said… Mass (Suriya, playing, well, Suriya) is a conman. It’s as if the editor guessed that we’d grow impatient with the extremely generic nature of the goings-on and knew that we’d end up fast-forwarding these scenes on the DVD anyway, so he decided to save us the trouble with an editing pattern that resembles fast-forwarding. There’s a line in the film that I kept wanting to use: “Edhukku ivvalavu periya scene potte?” But the heroine, Malini (Nayantara), is essentially the twelfth man. I didn’t care for the music (Yuvan Shankar Raja), but the staging is reminiscent of ‘Raakkamma’ in Thalapathy, with the rowdy hero setting eyes on the heroine in a religious setting. The hero-introduction song also made me sit up. It’s a madly inventive bit, and it made me imagine what it would be like if characters from a particular film kept drifting into other films, like ghosts.
You have to watch the scene that references Engeyum Eppodhum. Massu could have been a visionary “mass” movie. Very few seek to lift that idea off the page, shape it with a great technical team and create a work of vision. Why are Tamil directors so content with concept-level filmmaking? It’s as if the mere idea were enough. Storyline: Things get spooky when a man gets involved with ghosts Who cares if he actually plays that shot? He’s like a batsman who knows exactly what kind of shot he should be playing, but remains happy with that knowledge. But that’s the thing with Venkat Prabhu’s films these days.
It needs to be shepherded from the inside of his head to the screen. I loved the twist involving Jet (Premgi Amaren). (Ghost, The Sixth Sense, even Pisaasu - they all take turns possessing this screenplay.) And Venkat Prabhu keeps coming up with googlies. The idea behind the supernaturally themed Massu is terrific, even it feels like a mashup of many spirit-driven films. These days, though, I ask myself: “How did he make Chennai 600028 in the first place?”īut I have to give Venkat Prabhu this much: he is a great ‘ideas man’. But then we got Saroja and Goa, not bad films as such, but so loose and scattershot that you wondered why someone who made Chennai 600028 would bother with this kind of B-level material.
It was formally structured and scripted, and so moving and funny that it appeared a new voice had emerged. The only sixer in Venkat Prabhu’s career is his first film, the superb Chennai 600028. But if it’s a clearing-the-boundary cry, then sorry, there are a hundred fielders out there, palms cupped, looking at the sky. Massu Engira Masilamani comes with the tagline ‘A Venkat Prabhu Sixer.’ If this is a reference to Massu being the director’s sixth film, then fine. Like a benevolent Santa, the overlong Massu tries to have something for every segment of the audience.