Synopsis: When
Anamika, the girl who he is on a date with, is kidnapped, Arjun goes to
the police for help and gets into a dangerous situation from where
there is no escape. Movie Review: Arima Nambi opens
with a conversation in a high-end restaurant where we see Arjun Krishna
(Vikram Prabhu in a role that is not so different from the one in
Ivan Vera Mathiri)
and his friends rating girls. 'Oh no, not again,' you cringe and fear
what the rest of the film will be like. But then, we get a very nice
meet-cute. Arjun sees Anamika (
Priya Anand,
just adequate), a confident young girl, in the crowd and approaches
her. He woos her with a song, gets her contact and a day later, the two
are off on a date — drinking and talking to their hearts' content.
Anamika invites Arjun to her home for a drink and everything seems cozy
(it is refreshing to see a film that doesn't make a fuss over its leads
drinking). And then, Anamika is kidnapped, and her kidnappers mean
business. When Arjun tries to go after them, they don't think twice
about shooting at him.
All
these events happen in the first 20 minutes of the film and that is
when you realize that you are in the hands of a confident filmmaker.
First-time director
Anand Shankar
packs in enough background about the two characters so that we care
about them. We get why Arjun, who has known Anamika only for two days,
will risk his life to save her.
The first half of the film is
first rate. There is a genuine thrill in these portions that keeps us on
the edge of our seats. This is also when the film feels most plausible.
When Arumugham, a cop who takes up the case, saves Arjun when he is
about to be shot, it doesn't seem unlikely. He is a thinking cop and
MS Bhaskar
plays this role in a wonderful manner; we can see the wheels in his
mind turning as he goes through the details of the case. Like, when
Arjun tells him the details of the car in which Anamika has been
kidnapped, he pauses for a beat to process the information and only then
calls the control room. Similarly, when Arjun takes on his pursuers for
the first time, we are not surprised as we have seen him working out at
the gym in a lighter scene. What seemed like a hero-glorification shot
earlier (a close-up shot of Arjun's abs) now has context.
There
is a fair bit of exposition that feels unneeded. In one scene, Arjun and
Arumugan are eavesdropping on the conversation between the villains and
Anamika's dad and we get why the kidnap has taken place. Yet, the
director makes Arjun explain this to Arumugham, who, we know, is an
intelligent cop. Such spoon-feeding should not have been there in a film
that is smart enough to know what it wants to be.
The plot, in fact, is all-too familiar and resembles K Bhagyaraj's 1991 comedy thriller
Rudhra the
most. As in that film, here, too, there is a video of a murder that the
villain, a powerful politician, wants to destroy. Both the heroines are
damsels in distresses requiring the help of a hero with a presence of
mind. There is even a scene of the hero committing a bank robbery
(though, they are tonally very different). There are cops who are in
collusion with the villain. The all-important video gets destroyed in
both films. Finally, even the manner in which the hero indicts the
villain is similar. However, the treatment is very Hollywoodish here.
There
are scenes which show that Anand Shankar is merely taking a leaf out of
Hollywood thrillers. At least two sequences in the second half — a
rooftop chase sequence (adapted very well) and events at a police
control room (adapted a little clumsily) — are influenced by
The Bourne Ultimatum.
'Why am I not getting this?' asks a character, repeating a line from
the earlier film. Even a musical cue that crops up at crucial moments
resembles what is known as the 'Hans Zimmer horn' sound.
The film
also loses some of its verve in the second half, which feels a little
stretched and all over the place. And, yet, there is enough cleverness
in the writing and assuredness in the execution, especially for a debut
film, to make
Arima Nambi stand apart from your usual action thrillers.
