Billed as a political thriller, Kodiyil Oruvan is simply about a son fulfilling his mother’s wish and becoming an IAS officer. But the film is bigger in scale and brings in a political subplot to make the story engaging.
Kodiyil Oruvan review: Vijay Antony’s film is salvaged by strong 'amma' sentiment
Cinestaan Rating
Release Date: 17 Sep 2021
Haricharan Pudipeddi | Chennai, 19 Sep 2021 7:30 IST
Ananda Krishnan made heads turn with his impressive previous film Metro (2017), a slick thriller about chain-snatching gangs in Chennai. Despite being made on a low budget, he managed to make Metro stand out with its raw portrayal of action, especially scenes involving chain-snatching.
Ananda displays the same promise in his first big-budget film Kodiyil Oruvan (2021), which features Vijay Antony in a role that’s a refreshing departure from his usual avatars. Billed as a political thriller, Kodiyil Oruvan is simply about a son fulfilling his mother’s wish to see him become an IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer. But the film is much bigger in scale, and it brings in a political subplot to make the story engaging enough.
The opening 15 or 20 minutes of the film are hard-hitting and overly sentimental. The film begins in a place called Kombai, where a young woman is asked to contest the local body elections by a big shot. The woman, who manages to win the election, turns out to be an idealist and comes in the way of the man who had requested her to contest in the first place.
Unhappy with the woman’s way of dealing with things and handling the funds allocated to her constituency, he decides to kill her, but she escapes and also gives birth to her child, who also brings her back from the dead. The woman raises her kid with the goal of making him an IAS officer, but life takes a detour when he grows up and moves to Chennai.
As predictable as it gets in terms of its story, the film manages to get the commercial cinema formula right, and it works to a large extent. The film also milks the mother or 'amma' sentiment subplot which has worked in Vijay Antony’s films on a few occasions, and it is what keeps the film and the plot together despite some uneven storytelling.
As an actor who is well aware of his limitations when it comes to performance, Vijay Antony owns the role of Vijaya Raghavan and plays to his strengths. If you have followed his work, you would know that he is someone who can’t really make a difference with his acting but usually chooses scripts that overshadow his limitations.
The film is salvaged by good action choreography and some convenient twists. Shot in a real housing society, the location plays a key role in setting the mood of the film. Kodiyil Oruvan draws inspiration from Shankar’s Mudhalvan (1999) and Nishikant Kamat’s Evano Oruvan (2007), which starred R Madhavan. All these films are about idealistic heroes who recognize a deep sense of belonging with the society they are a part of. At some point, all these heroes have to deal with their breaking points and the repercussions which follow.
For Vijaya Raghavan, who thinks it’s his responsibility to help the people of his locality, he learns that politics is his trump card. The film ends with Vijaya Raghavan’s entry into politics and it hints at returning with the second part in 2022.