Sakalakala Vallavan

Sakalakala Vallavan, like its namesake — the 1982 Kamal Haasan-starrer — is about a villager who tames a city girl. But while that film, despite its outdated and sexist outlook, managed to be entertaining, this one is exasperating from start to finish. Sakthi (Jayam Ravi), the son of a local politician, falls in love with Anjali (an overweight, scantily-dressed Anjali), the moraponnu of Chinnabuthi (Soori, trying to imitate Vadivelu from Winner but simply not possessing the body language to make the role funny), who is constantly at loggerheads with him. But circumstances force Sakthi to marry Divya (a tired-looking Trisha), a city girl, because his father (Prabhu) asks him to. However, all that Divya wants from him is a divorce.

This is a formulaic plot, yes, but what makes it intolerable is how lazily everything is done here. The film wants to be a comedy and it thinks that you can make anything funny if you can gives the audiences a scene that is a reference of an already popular scene. So, we get an endless stream of movie references (from Mouna Ragam to SIngam) in the way of dialogues, character names and background music. It also tries to show that it is self-aware by telling us every time the characters are about to break out into a song, but instead of being cute, this only reiterates the staleness of the formula. Even the stunt choreography is cliched — a shot of a bus blown up, the fighters falling onto the various props, hero clenching his fist and so on.

And if there is no reference to trot out, it turns horribly sexist — making fun of domestic abuse (slapping the wife as a means of keeping her under the husband's control), domestic rape (the hero is so enraged that the heroine doesn't want to sleep with him, that he tells he will rape her), molestation (the hero falling on top of heroines portrayed as romance)... Well, you get the drift.

Then, there is the inconsistent characterization — a modern girl, who calls herself "independent", agrees to...