Bairavaa review: Vijay tries best to live up to expectations, but his latest is a big letdown

Straight of the bat Vijay’s mass masala, Bairavaa is a big letdown. Not an engaging commercial entertainer, the movie plods due to an outdated storyline and presentation. Vijay tries his best to live up to expectations, but in the end is let down by a weak script and lacklustre direction. [caption id=“attachment_3200876” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Bairavaa. Image courtesy: Facebook page[/caption] The story and presentation is reminiscent of yesteryear Tamil commercial mass movies where the hero looks like he is having a conversation with the audiences (Read fans). Bairavaa (Vijay), a fun-loving and friendly guy does everything that mass heroes have been doing over the years. He works as a successful loan recovery collection agent for banks in Chennai along with his comedian (Satish) friend. One day he meets a girl, Malarvizhi (Keerthy Suresh), at a wedding and saves her from some guys trying to kill her. Our hero expresses his love for the heroine, a medical student, and decides to protect her and expose the bad guy — a butcher turned corrupt educationalist — PK (Jagapathy Babu), who runs a private medical college. The saving graces of this insipid film are the well-choreographed action blocks, the punch line dialogues and star charisma of its hero. Vijay plays cricket as a batsman imitating the shots of various cricketers like MS Dhoni (including a helicopter shot), Virender Sehwag and Ricky Ponting using his hard hitting strokes to cause injury to the villains. But towards the end the hero-villain cat and mouse games and the court scenes becomes repetitive and tiresome. Badly written and predictable, the villain characters look more like jokers. Keerthy Suresh as Vijay’s love interest is impressive and does a neat job. Another major drawback is the music of the new sensation in Kollywood, Santosh Narayanan, as there is not even one peppy number. Usually, Vijay films have good music and a catchy fast number. The film, at two hours and 48 minutes, is an ordeal to sit through, leaving the audience with a sense that a good 20 minutes could have been trimmed from the final cut. In early 2000, director Bharathan started as a successful scriptwriter for veteran director Dharani and made hits like Dhill, Ghilli, Dhool, etc, before turning director with Azhagiya Tamil Magan (2007) with Vijay, which sank ay the box office. Now years later, Vijay gave him one more chance as writer and director, where he has rehashed his earlier stories. The director has failed to gauge the new age Tamil commercial cinema audiences.