Film: Pagadai Pagadai
Director: Sashi Shankar
Cast: Dilip Kumar, Divya Singh, Kovai Sarala, Mayilsami
Pagadai Pagadai is about how a simpleton is made a scapegoat in an insurance fraud case. Malayalam director Sashi Shankar, who’d earlier directed the Suriya-starrer Perazhagan (a remake of his own Malyalam hit Kunji Koonan), wields the megaphone for this film.
The protagonist Saravanan’s goal is to marry an NRI girl and settle down in the US. He gets excited when he comes across a wealthy, glamorous girl who expresses her desire to marry him, through a matrimonial service centre. What happens when the girl comes to India? The plot delves on that. Midway through the movie, the audience gets to see the other face of the hero. ‘Pagadai mission...money game starts...’, reads the caption at the interval. Seeing the dual role the actor plays — one being simple and the other a negative one — one finds resemblance with the director’s earlier films. It’s a lazy screenplay and rushed-through narration. There is a rescue act by the hero when the heroine falls in a deep hole between rocks (like in the English movie 24 hours). Debutante Divya Singh cuts a pretty picture and Dilip (a former child artiste in films like Jayam) is passable. There is nothing much to entice a viewer in the movie.