If you ask **RS Durai Senthilkumar**, director of **Ethir Neechal**, what’s the one line for his movie, he might end up with any one of the following answers;
+ A young man who has a problem with his peculiar name, realises that a name gets fame because of what you do.
+ It’s a comedy movie about a young man who falls in love with a girl after changing his name and later whatever he did comes back to haunt him.
+ It’s a story about a young girl who lost her career because of politics in sports and coaches a young man to win a marathon.
He might also say “all of the above” and that exactly is the problem of Ethir Neechal. The problem of trying to depict multiple stories in one movie. The truth is that each one could have been an enjoyable movie in its own right. With Siva Karthikeyan at the helm, I would have gone for the first two. Really, a comedy of errors about a peculiar name would have made a wonderful watch than what it’s now.
Ethir Neechal has become a mashup of sorts rather than a complete movie experience. Honestly, the whole marathon part doesn’t work out at all. One of the important things that you need in a sports movie is that you would want the audience root for the underdog. For instance in Rocky, he is always an underdog, even when he is a champion. The recent example that I can give is Haridas.
The marathon sequence is so unauthentic that you will end up asking “oh ok. Is this marathon? “. You can see everyone with clear face and clean dresses. It makes you think that they are doing a fashion show for Adidas. The only interesting part is the way **Valli’s character (Nandita)** trains Siva Karthikeyan.
To be fair, Nandita’s character was the only well etched character in this bad movie. If the director had taken a biopic of Shanti (the commonwealth medal winner who lost her career because of hormone testing) with Nandita, it would have been award worthy. Sathish as Peter is right out of Santhanam mould and Priya Anand has nothing to do in the movie. Anirudh is pretty impressive with his Ethir Neechaladi and Velicha Poove. While I am amazed at Vaali’s up-to-date lyrics, I wish Dhanush stops writing songs (enough…please). I am not going to talk about background scores any more.
Ethir Neechal could have been lot better than what it is now. What it needed was little more focus. The impact is lost when the director is unclear what he wants to say in his movie. As a movie watcher, I had to do a Ethir Neechal to finish this movie.
*A 1/5 and you can watch it if you are sucker for those mindless comedies. If you want to watch a sensible sports movie, watch Haridas or Vennila Kabaddi Kuzhu. *
P.S: Why use KB-Nagesh classic’s name for this movie? cringe