Valimai begins with promise. In similar fashion to H Vinoth’s Theeran Adhigaram Ondru, a compelling action thriller, this Ajith Kumar film starts off in a blaze of violence. It’s got bikes, drugs, fancy gadgetry and helmets, chain snatching and murder and bikes. Did I mention bikes? Lots of them. It’s an interesting territory a lot of mainstream filmmakers are exploiting. They don’t flinch from violence in a star masala film. Star vehicles and festival event films used to be benign action and family entertainers. They have their politics and persuasions, but nobody went too far. Then Vetrimaaran did. Karthik Subbaraj did. It’s almost a mainstay of Lokesh Kanagaraj films. Nelson too. H Vinoth didn’t hold back in his film with Karthi. This start felt like maybe Valimai will be new and no holds barred territory for Ajith. Mysterious bike gangs? Drug busts? Chain snatching and murders? A systemic meltdown in a city? Juicy.
But then everything falls flat in Valimai. The blood dissipates and family comes in. There is an emotional arc with the mother and two brothers. Why? Only H Vinoth can tell. If you have Ajith doing bike stunts and invest in building a world where the stakes are high, what use is this melodrama? This is supposed to be an action film! But Valimai looks like some late 90s and early 00s Vijaykanth film that people ironically enjoy on TV today. The production values are nothing to write home about either.
Police officer Arjun (Ajith Kumar), we are told, does things differently. He looks down on encounters. Great! But he also wants to reform the criminals in the form of crash courses. Crime in Chennai has risen exponentially and Arjun steps in to do something about it. There is no real imagination here apart form the set up of the bike mafia, their modus operandi and a cultish leader. It's really more cult than mafia (the low lever bikers even hail and claim Kartikeya as their “leader”). Vinoth says these are unemployed graduates who turned to a world of crime, stripped of any emotion or ideology. Sure, restless economy, neoliberalism, class and caste differences will lead to increase in crime, but Vinoth dilutes the concepts to the barest minimum. Why is there unemployment? We hear snatches of dialogs about people from other states stealing jobs. Arjun’s brother Kutty bemoans that he can’t be cleaning tables lest his friends come and sit on that table. So, is he the problem and not the system—whatever that is—if they got jobs? Vinoth explains none of this.
We can tell this is a real struggle for Vinoth and his star Ajith. He’s got an idea on paper but there is no writing to flesh it out or even back it. Where did Kartikeya’s character come from, what was his past? What was Arjun’s past apart from this big family? There is a snatch of casual dialog between Sofia (Huma Qureshi), a Narcotics bureau officer, and Arjun but we get no throwback to this past.
Theeran Adhigaram Ondru had a fascinating action set piece on top of a bus and Valimai with its teasing of bikes and chases promised a lot. Sadly, there is no real thrill in any set piece. Vinoth films them in very straightforward fashion, there are quick cuts galore and we don’t see Arjun going from Point A to Point B in a single shot for the action to be fluid and to keep us at the edge of our seats. During a dirt bike action sequence, he keeps cutting to a top view shot that does nothing. Sofia, on the other hand, gets one such scene with a gun in hand, walking out and landing a few punches as she walks out of a vehicle. Some of the scenes are unintentional comic bloopers. The Chennai control room or wherever this ultramodern team is sitting resembles a miniature version out of some 80s space film.
Hell, Kamal Haasan did it better in Vikram in 1986 and he was attempting a pulpy B movie - James Bond crossover. The screen graphics look tacky, and characters spell out the most obvious things. For fun they throw around terms like dark web (they call it so only in “foreign countries”, one of them says), RAG browser and what not. Vinoth thinks it is easy to fool the audience. Maybe it is, what do I know?
It’s always disappointing to see a promising director bogged down by a star. But there isn’t one name to pin the criticisms on with Valimai. It’s shocking a film as shoddy looking as this one took this long. Or to even ideate. But that at least can be explained off by the pandemic. But what about all the craze for updates and expectations? Tamil cinema has moved miles beyond the likes of Valimai. Sure, films like these still get made, even with big stars but the needle has moved, and the benchmark are set high. Sooner some filmmakers and stars realise that the better.
Rating: 1 Quint out of 5
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