The last movie Santhanam and Sethu did together was the hideous Kanna Laddu Thinna Aasaiya. The movie had ‘Powerstar’ Srinivasan in a full-fledged role. As an aspiring Bharatnatyam dancer. And if that’s not enough, most of the jokes were stale and relied on his antics for laughter.
Valeba Raja, with a story as stale as Santhanam’s humour, is a worthy successor.
*****
Man loves woman. Man tries to woo said woman. Another woman, who happens to be man’s friend, tries to to help him win his love. But, man and the woman that helped him, fall in love. Just as original woman accepts man’s love. Cue some sort of twist. Cue end.
*****
And here, in no particular order, is a list of things that the movie offers.
- Sethu, as Karthik, a manchild who can’t decide which woman he likes more. And compares them to Gulab Jaamun and Rasgullas, which cause him similar confusion. In real life, Sethu is actually Dr. Sethu, a dermatologist. With the quality of acting he displays, we only hope he is good at dermatology.
- Santhanam plays the loyal second fiddle (again). His job is to give unsolicited love advice to the hero (again), and mock every single person who passes by him (yes, again). In other words, he replicates his role from Theeya Vela Seiyyanum Kumaaru, with the addition of an unfortunate wig.
- There’s VTV Ganesh, married to a Hindi-speaking woman. He uses that gravelly voice – the one that has become really old – to reel off stale, stereotypical dialogues. Except he now has the traditional Tamil movie Hindi accent. The result is dialogues like “Karthik, nee nalla saapdudhu, strong aidudhu.”
- There’s Naan Kadavul Rajendran who pops up randomly and gives us – the audience – advice on romance. Stuff like, “A woman is like hot tea, and men are like biscuits. You think it’s a good idea to dip the biscuit in the tea, but it will simply break the biscuit.” #ThankYouDulyNoted
- If you think a song with misogynistic lyrics isn’t bad enough, Valeba Raja offers you a song which has lyrics from all the misogynistic songs you have ever heard.
- Also, this song features a cameo by ‘Powerstar’ Srinivasan.
- Still looking for reasons?
- There are some ‘quirky’ characters – The hero’s sister, who has OCD, and needs to clean whenever she is angry/irritated/nervous. Which is practically all the time. There’s a whole family named ‘Chitra-something’ – Chitra Lakshmanan, Chitra Kala, Chitra Veni. Why?
- There’s an interesting ‘Red Mail Van’ theory in this film: if you see a red mail van, you must pray for something until you spot the next red vehicle, and your wish will come true. The third time this happens in the movie, we begin to pray for this movie to end. ASAP.
No luck.
*****
The Valeba Raja 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.