'Vedi' (Tamil)
Director: Prabhu Deva
Cast: Vishal, Sameera Reddy, Poonam Kaur and Vivek
The familiar gangster- cop imbroglio takes yet another form in 'Vedi', a remake of the Telugu flick 'Souryam'. It has Vishal playing a tough no-nonsense cop who takes on a dreaded mobster, his wayward son, and their dozens of armed henchmen, all single handedly.
The film has sibling sentiment, humour and plenty of action. But it’s a decades old plot, the whole experience giving a sense of déja vu throughout. Prabhu Deva,who directs this version, has followed the original version almost faithfully. Except when he makes slight superficial changes like shifting locations, to suit Tamil nativity. But there seems to have been no effort to remove the flaws or infuse any freshness by way of narrative style.
Vishal (his home production) has traversed through theses types of roles earlier. So there is nothing different from his previous roles. He gets a good opening scene where in the early mist he sneaks on some goons, gives them a bashing of their lives and disappears before they realise what has happened.
The plot travels through Orissa, Kolkatta and Thoothukudy, with intercuts to an armed gang in search of the hero. The hero’s trip to Kolkata has an agenda, which we get to learn later.
He joins as a physical trainer in a college (where everyone speaks Tamil) and stays as a paying guest at the house of Paru (Sameera Reddy), her parents, and her best friend Aishwaria. The trio being in the same college, he turns into a protector to the two girls, warding off unwanted admirers and bashing up the nuisance elements.
Sameera Reddy’s foray into Tamil films had resulted in her getting some roles of substance (Vaaranam Aayiram). But here, she’s been used solely to provide the glamour quotient for the love angle and the dream song-dance numbers. With sibling sentiment having an edge over the love angle, it’s Poonam Kaur as Aishwaria (reprising the role she’d essayed in the Telugu version), who gets the performing part. There is Vivek as a senior physical instructor. His balloon-infused 7-pack comedy track is not much to make you role in the aisle with laughter.
The gangsters are the typical ones. Eashwara Murthy (Shinde, by now adept at playing the southern mobster with a comic touch) is an extortionist, with a hand in every illegal racket around Thoothukudy. Murthy’s wayward son does what every wayward son of villains does in films. The guy shoots down defiant cops and prosecution lawyers, molests every woman he sets eyes on even if it’s a cop, and throws maniacal tantrums when he doesn’t get what he wants.
So when the woman cop at the receiving end of his lust pays him back with vengeance, we root for her. The fall out between the hero and the gangster is narrated in a flashback, and so also the hero’s mission to Kolkata. The scenes nearing the climax where Urvasi and Shriman join in, reduces the whole gangster-cop drama to a comical farce. The flashback of the orphaned siblings has a couple of touching moments.
The songs come as speed breakers, slackening the flow. A pedestrian script with no gripping moments, Vedi has nothing novel or exciting to offer a viewer by way of plot or narration.