Goli Soda

Goli Soda is about four friends (orphans at that) who try to create an identity for themselves, their romance and their fight against a big shot who wants to squish them beneath his feet because their action inadvertently has resulted in a loss of face for him. If this reads like the plot of a typical masala movie, you are not wrong. Goli Soda IS a masala movie. But what sets it apart and even makes it one-of-a-kind is that its protagonists aren't grown-up 20-somethings but adolescents, early teens to be specific. There have been Hollywood films that have transposed the sensibilities of a regular genre movie to ones that have kids as the principal characters, like Brick, Bugsy Malone and Young Sherlock Holmes, but this is probably a first in Tamil cinema.

However, unlike those films, Goli Soda stops with fitting only its young protagonists with adult, mass hero attitudes; the other characters, including the antagonists, are all grown-ups. This does pose a challenge because young boys taking on rowdies can take away the seriousness but Vijay Milton manages to evade this hazard to a large extent by keeping the plot fleet-footed so that we don't dwell on the less believable scenes. That these teenagers are played by the cast of Pasanga is an added advantage. The four boys have grown into adolescents but their acting is as assured as in that film.

Pulli ( Kishore), Settu ( Sreeram), Sithappa (Pandi) and Murugesh (Murugesh) are orphans and thick friends, who make a living doing odd jobs at the Koyambedu market. The two adults who empathize with them are Manthiravadhi ( Imman Annachi, who has a riotously funny scene at the police station) and Aachi ( Sujatha), who is a wholesale dealer at the place. Pulli and Sithappa have romantic interests (Chandhini and Seetha who actually acquit themselves better than typical masala movie heroine), and Aachi spurs the friends to strive and create an identity for themselves. She manages to get them help from NKB ( Madhusudhan, fo...