Language: Tamil
Cast: Vishnu Vishal, Regina Cassandra, Yogi Babu
Director: Chella Ayyavu
When you walk into Silukkuvaarpatti Singam, or a similar comedy like Vishnu Vishal's earlier Velainnu Vanthutta Vellakkaran (one of the many films that gets referenced here), your only expectation is for it be a fun detour from reality. These films are, after all, set in a logic-defying world where nothing really is at stake. 'Does it offer many LOL moments?', and 'did I laugh hard enough?'—those are the only two questions that matter. And here, the answer is, sort of.
So we witness the return of Vishnu Vishal as a police officer after, well, Raatsasan. He plays Sathyamoorthi, a carefree police constable who doubles up as an office boy, buying meals for his senior official (Livingston). He shrugs off his responsibilities but is more than willing to pick a fight over an omelette. He also falls for every other girl he sees (and they seem to reciprocate, though I can't understand why). When a superior officer tries to dramatically motivate Sathyamoorthi to pursue a dreaded criminal, he runs away…literally.
Apart from Sathyamoorthi, Silukkuvaarpatti Singam also introduces us to a variety of crazy characters to set up a dozen-odd plot points, like the villainous Cycle Shankar (Sai Ravi) and his wise-cracking sidekick Tony (Yogi Babu). All these characters get their own funny episodes as well, though only a few work. There's an elaborate joke involving crying wives begging police officers to not release their drunk husbands who've been locked up, and that was, tiring, to say the least. We also get an offensive rape joke when Yogi Babu's character suggests "pulling a Paruthiveeran climax" on a lone 'woman' walking in the night, though many in the audience didn't seem to share my disgust and laughed out loud.
Vishnu Vishal, however, gets some of the film's funniest scenes. He gets a hilarious line where he justifies the torture of locked-up criminals, which was apparently, his only take-away from watching Visaranai. The film also cleverly closes all the plot points it sets up early on. From having shades of a typical Sundar C film, it ends up becoming one towards the climax…the climactic car chase, for one, shares an uncanny resemblance to the one from Sundar C's Kalakalappu.
It's a film that partially succeeds in what it sets out to do, but Chella Ayyavu's film fails in his attempt at that one laugh-till-you-cry stretch that we got in Ezhil's Velainnu Vanthutta Vellakkaran and the uninterruptible Robo Shankar. Sadly, the film's only audaciously funny bit comes during the end credits with Anand Raj revealing his secret identity…it's a scene I can watch nooru thadava. The same, though, cannot be said about Silukkuvaarpatti Singam.