After delivering two successful adult comedies in Hara Hara Mahadevaki and Iruttu Arayil Murattu Kuththu, director Santhosh P Jayakumar has laid his hands on a family entertainer. Ghajinikanth is the official Tamil remake of the Telugu superhit film Bhale Bhale Magadivoy. Ghajinikanth has Arya and Sayyeshaa playing the leads, while Sathish, Karunakaran, Sampath and many others add on to the cast.
Rajinikanth (Arya) is born with a chronic case of attention diversion that results in memory loss. Basically, If he is doing something and his attention is diverted to something else, he completely forgets what he was doing before, thereby getting engrossed in the new work. The film deals with how this defect affects his life, but particularly his love.
Santhosh doesn't try too much to waver from the original, as he recreates all the scenarios as they were played out in the original. Right from the word go, the attempt to feed the audience with comical sequences portraying Rajini's defect is underway. But the primary drawback is when all this seems superficially staged. Somewhere, a section of the audience may get the feel of watching a series of advertisements of a product that is endorsing this defect! Santhosh maintains his style of packaging the screenplay with comedy scenes taking center-stage and the emotional sequences trying hard to convince you that they are actually sentiments.
Santhosh seems to have clarity on the fact that he is here to purely entertain the audience with harmless humorous sequences. On paper, the concept of this film is a really exciting idea and fresh for the Tamil audience. However, a debate comes into play when a question arises; How much of the super interesting idea is executed successfully? There are conversations between characters that would resemble many of those we've come across before, but sometimes they work for the benefit of the idea presented. (No, we're not talking about the Vasool Raja recreation).
Sayyeshaa as Vandana, looks ravishing, though she falls into the cadre of being that quintessential commercial heroine who somehow never seems to distrust her lover no matter how many cues she gets about his unintended diablerie. She can transform into a potential performer if she can add more expressions to her kitty. Sampath is the heroine's father and he plays to his well-defined motives. There is an antagonist (Lingesh). There's a background theme that plays whenever he is in a scene, and that is how we're reminded that he is the villain. But that is about it. Sathish's one-liners, especially the references to 'Enga Veetu Mapillai' and other contemporary jokes are laughable but one might want more of these hilarious scenes.
Arya's performance in the first half looks slightly unnatural, and it gets worse in a scene where he has to transform into an emotionally wrecked man. This could be due to lack of proper guidance from behind the camera, but his portrayal of the emotion ceases to convince you. Having seen him perform tougher scenes with conviction, this one will disappoint some.
On the technical side of things, Balamurali Balu brings to the table, commercially inclined songs that provide ample space for Sayyeshaa to show off her competency in dance. When it comes to cuts, a fraction of the viewers might prefer a crispier version of the film. Ghajinikanth is well lit, sometimes in excess. But on the whole, the visuals aren't tacky.