Thambi is Madhavan’s attempt at casting off his oh-so-sweet image and becoming a rough-tough, masala-movie hero. (If S Ve Sekhar were to describe this transition, he’d probably say: from Jangri Young Man to Angry Young Man.) So that means his character lives someplace where everyone else is severely hard of hearing. It probably isn’t a coincidence that his nickname, Thambi, actually stands for Thambi Velu Thondaiman. He’s a thondai-man, all right – every utterance of his threatens to shatter the speakers over your head. And then there’s the eye thing. Each time he stares down the bad guys, you cower in fright that his eyeballs are going to pop out of their sockets and land in your lap.
With that voice and with those eyes, you know you’re in regular dishum-dishum territory – unfortunately, this is also Vijayakanth territory. You can see why Madhavan signed on to do this; he probably wanted that big, massy hit that’s been eluding him since Run. But after watching his class acts in Anbe Sivam and Kannathil Muthamittal and Nala Damayanthi and, especially, Rang De Basanti, I just couldn’t see the actor in this part. Oh, he does try, but, as I said, this needed a Vijayakanth to fully put it over.
With Vijayakanth, you wouldn’t mind an action scene like the one here, where the hero punches the baddie so hard, his extended forearm vibrates like a fleshy tuning fork for some five seconds after the baddie has bitten the dust. Hell, with Vijayakanth, you’d probably demand a refund of your ticket money if this sequence didn’t exist. A title card early on describes Thambi thus: peranbum perunkobamum kondavan. With Madhavan, you wish there’d been a little more peranbu – with love interest Pooja (Vidyasagar gifts them a beautiful duet, Sudum nilavu) – and a little less perunkobam.
But that anger is what Thambi is all about. Thambi is angry because of reasons we don’t learn about until well into the second half, and his anger is directed at the local thug Sankarapandian (Biju Menon). So every time the latter tries to disturb the peace, Thambi stands in his way. What’s interesting here – and the only thing that saves the movie from becoming a complete cliché – is that Thambi is actually something of a pacifist. The bad guys, unfortunately, won’t listen to his words, so that’s why he lets his fists do the talking. Will Thambi be able to get his message of peace across? Will the bad guys see the error of their ways? Does the sun rise in the east?
Director Seeman has been getting a lot of acclaim for his dialogue, and I must say he goes to town with fiery declarations such as this one: “Maanai konnaa jail, manushanai konnaa bail.” (Somewhere, T Rajendar is smiling.) Want more? A character says, “Lanjam vaanginen, kaidhu seidhaargal. Lanjam koduthen, vidudhalai seidhaargal.” (Somewhere, Mu. Karunanidhi is smiling.) Why, Seeman even quotes liberally from Bharathiyar’s Pudhiya Aathichoodi! The film’s publicity material – the posters and hoardings – showed us Madhavan simmering under block letters proclaiming achcham thavir and roudhram pazhagu, and even in the movie, as Thambi goes about practicing his martial arts, the background is filled with chants of udalinai urudhi sei and yeru pol nada.
But an interest in the language is one thing, an ability to integrate that into involving cinema is quite another. Had half the effort in the dialogues gone towards the characterisations, we wouldn’t have wondered what actors like Vadivelu and Manivannan and Chandrasekhar are doing here. (If their scenes had hit the cutting room floor, we’d still have ended up with pretty much the same movie – okay, maybe with one-and-a-half chuckles less.) Seeman tries to build Thambi up by having him wear a Che Guevara T-shirt and quote from Gandhi and Anna, but there’s a different hero that Madhavan is begging to be compared to. There’s a part where Thambi is thrown into barbed wire by the bad guys, and it’s exactly like in Sathya, when the bad guys toss Kamal Haasan into barbed wire. Now that’s the kind of hero I was hoping Madhavan would want to become – not Vijayakanth.