Director: Hari
Cast: Vikram, Keerthy Suresh, Aishwarya Rajesh, Bobby Simha
Composer: Devi Sri Prasad
Take two of our excellent mainstream filmmakers. Kamal Haasan and SS Rajamouli. The two of them recently indulged in sequels to their successful films with varying results. They also made sequels that completed a whole and didn’t exist as standalone pieces of work. The importance of memory and continuity was paramount to them. Both had opening credits that brushed over the events of the earlier film. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion particularly did a great job with its seamless throwback images and a lovely, melancholic score to remind you of the stakes with which the earlier film ended. Vishwaroopam 2 had the events of the previous film play over a series of stills accompanied by a song that asks, “Do you know who I am?” Both done artfully, giving a feel of the earlier films, trusting the audience enough to let them fill in the gaps.
It is impossible and outright crazy to compare Hari the filmmaker to the names above. But Hari doesn’t even try. This is what happens over the course of the opening credits of Saamy Square, the sequel to the highly successful, memorable Hari-Vikram collaboration from 2003 – Saamy. We get whole scenes from Saamy. With actual dialogues and a Trisha obstructed just enough so she does not get a credit here, a role passed on to Aishwarya Rajesh in the sequel. I suspect they even re-shot a scene or two from Saamy with Aishwarya Rajesh. We get the mass scenes and the famed background score that played every time Saamy cracked his knuckles as if he just woke up with a hangover. The hangover though is wished upon us, the audience, as Hari takes a sharp object to every memory of a cult film like Saamy. That’s what the opening credits accomplish – they squash all hopes that Saamy Square could be entertaining or that Hari had any filmmaking chops left in him after fifteen years.
Fifteen years is a long time in cinema. Obscure debutants and children of yesteryear actors have become stars, careers have ended, and big names have turned to politics. Hari and his brand of films remain the same. He isn’t even the only one or the first. There was a time when this seemed novel, a policeman with unhealthy disregard for rules (read human rights). It tapped, like it always does and is supposed to, into some baser instinct within us, the people who were sick and tired of the system and the state, a quasi-vigilante within the law and order looked like a superhero. Tirunelveli or countless other complex cities and towns became Gotham and easy solutions promised great entertainment.
These could have been done away with even ten years ago but here we are with Perumal Pichhai’s son – Raavana Pichai (Bobby Simha) – who torments the same town. As his name suggests, he is from Sri Lanka, the son of a soothsaying mother (Sudha Chandran) surrounded by a bunch of what we must believe to be Buddhist monks. Simha and Sudha Chandran struggle to stick to one out of the several wrong versions of the Sri Lankan Tamil accent they come up with. But if we are talking accents, the problem is not just overseas. In the first half, we get to hear several people speak in bad Hindi, including Keerthy Suresh whose lip sync goes all over the place. Maybe this is some sort of revenge for having north Indian actresses speak Tamil with bad lip sync in every other film.
While the sequel arrives fifteen years later, the events of the film itself jump 28 years. Hari tries really hard to lend some mythic to Aarusaamy’s son Ramasaamy but it is all very tiring. He almost leaves masala and walks over to fantasy territory in doing so. There are spirits living in police uniforms, eyeballs doubling up as dice in the hands of Sudha Chandran, caesarean births performed after the death of the mother (don’t even ask). With such visuals, there is something eerily uncomfortable about a Sri Lankan Tamil harassing a town, some lip service to honour killings and a painful, disingenuous lecture on caste. It would make anyone gorge their eyeballs out and offer it to Hari as penance for having watched the film. Early in the film he inspires a tiny amount of confidence in a fight scene choreographed into a song sequence. It makes for a good music video but everything before and after the song suggests this was pure accident.
Recommended
It must be fascinating to hear Hari narrate a script or a film to his actor. If he still does, that is. He probably gives cues. An intro fight here. A song here. A politician dies here. A fridging of the actress (in Saamy Square, three women get fridged, one of them an unnamed character) here. It is no surprise that in over a decade, Hari didn’t grow up. It is sad that Vikram too, hasn’t. That is how you punch a film like Saamy Square in the face.
*****
The Saamy Square 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.