Kavan is your usual SuBa pulp fiction …err film. There’s the bad guy who does bad, immoral things. Out to get him is the principled, upright, smart-ass who always gets the girl. Also around is a tier-two villain – a loudmouth politician who does what he can to aid the main villain. Around this principle, SuBa weave a three-hour long film with ridiculously boring music, out-of-place production design and hard-hitting dialogues.
I’ve never missed Sujatha more.
The movie follows the same route one usually expects. Director KV Anand is a man who likes to stick to what he knows best. He specialises in films that lace conspiracy theories with real time events. The result is a film that is just short of a fantasy. It’s real enough to be called a sort-of serious film, but has enough fantasy elements to satisfy the masses.
And in his five films as a director, Anand has perfected this formula to a fine degree.
Kavan, for all its faults, is entertaining. There’s something compelling about the cocktail of sensationalism and outright ludicrousness it presents so seriously, that one cannot help but watching.
It’s like that kuzha adi sandai we cannot drag our eyes away from. We’ve got better things to do, our time can obviously be better spent… but there’s just no looking away.
*****
Vijay Sethupathi, Madonna Sebastian are the lead actors. In their previous Kadhalum Kadandhu Pogum, both these artists played finely-etched characters – memorable and satisfying. Here, the story-line reduces them to mere caricatures. Sethupathi is Thilak, the fine, upstanding smart-ass KV Anand prototype. Madonna, on the other hand, is a nice upgrade on the KV heroine. She’s sensible, for one, and has a lot of gumption. That’s saying something. Especially considering that KV’s last heroine was the unmemorable Amyra Dastur, a manic pixie girl if there ever was one.
Adding bad vibes to the mix is Akashdeep Saigal,who calls himself Skywalker now. Last we saw him, he was mixing a cocktail of drugs into some young woman’s drink. Here, he indulges in a different kind of mind-addling. As a media baron, he is in the business of manufacturing story-lines and news to further his own interests. It’s quite easy to hate him. As are all KV villains.
The hero and the heroine work for the villain, find out that he’s reprehensible. And then, move on to a smaller TV station to wage a (righteous) war against him. As far as movie plots go, it’s quite cliched.
Recommended
If not for T Rajendar’s presence, this could have turned out to be just another rehash of Ko/Maatraan. Because this actor is there, and because he is subdued and not his usual exuberant self, this film is entertaining. It’s a rare glimpse into the actor he was much before he became Internet’s favourite whipping boy.
And perhaps this, along with nice performances by Vikranth and Jagan, make it a film you can watch once.
*****
The Kavan review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.