Actress Varalaxmi Sarathkumar who was last seen on actor Vimal’s Kanni Raasi is back on screens in the lead role in her mass action drama Chasing. There are some films that right away give you signs that it is going to ruin your senses. The sooner you pick those signs the sooner you can go on to self preservation mode and minimize the damage it unleashes your way. Actress Varalaxmi Sarathkumar’s latest drama Chasing is the classic example of it. After a long gap, at a time when women centric films have begun to hit the theaters frequently, in comes Chasing. Making female oriented entertainers are definitely healthy for Tamil cinema but not films like Chasing that give you an awful cinematic experience. So how bad does Chasing affect you? To know that let us get in to the movie review.
Chasing begins with kidnapping sequence in which a girl is abducted. We have a mass heroine introduction scene where Athira (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar) storms in to the picture and rescues the girl in no time just with a simple straightforward investigation. Fear walks alongside her and that is why when she is in the picture, criminals tremble and give away the information to save themselves from her power packed punches. We wish only if there was at least a single cop like that in every constituency, we would not have to worry about surging chain snatching cases. The moment of drugs and sexual harassment has spiked in the state and Varalaxmi Sarathkumar is tasked with the mission to hunt down drug lord and sexual offenders. Debutant story teller has picked a done to death storyline in Tamil cinema but that is not his slip, where he is exposed is his lack of ability to build an engaging drama on it. He borrows almost most of the cliché elements from mass action entertainers that attained commercial success some 10 years ago and places them one after another in his film.
Chasing reminds us of women centric films done by actress Vijayashanti in the 90’s. Those films were great fun for the 90’s kids to see actress Vijayashanti using the shoulders of henchmen to take a run on the wall and to kick them with a ‘bishum’ background score. Even Chasing has those sorts of scenes but they are not funny anymore and the background scores are ear splitting. The flick is touted to be an action drama and for that purpose alone all we get is needless stunt scenes and chasing sequences. Even then, for a film that boasts to be an action entertainer the stunt choreography are poorly planned and executed. It appears as though the film maker first fixed these sequences and then built his story around it. Along with this the comfortable writing without even a whiff of logic tests our patience. Chasing looks like a film that is made without a fully completed script on hand – like a group of people turning up on sets every morning and shot whatever they thought was best fit.
Just like how, majority of films are written to uphold the image of heroes in Tamil cinema, Chasing is written exclusively for actress Varalaxmi Sarathkumar. Nothing wrong in writing a film for actress but it has to be tolerable at least to an extent. None of the characters in the film have a proper characterization. There are a group of youngsters in the police team that works with Athira, but all they do is stand still with a wooden expression and in times of danger wait for their chief to come and rescue them. Tamil cinema directors and item songs are inseparable twins. Even if it is a female lead subject, so what – a film must have an item number or else the audience would not turn up to the theaters. As if the audience google up to check whether the entertainer has a sizzling song before they book their tickets.
Actress Varalaxmi Sarathkumar’s choice of films is gravely wrecking her potential. It is high time that the actress gets fussy in choosing her films. Comedians Bala Saravanan and Imman Annachi not only fail to do the task that they were roped in to do but also annoy us in the pretext of comedy. Actor Super Subbarayan has nothing new to offer and he does what he generally does in every movies. The rest of the cast has delivered a pathetic performance.
Everything seems to have gone down south for Chasing. Even the technical departments have collapsed completely. Music director Thasi’s tracks do not hold our attention and his tracks are just deafening. Cinematographer E. Krishnasamy’s camera work is extremely disappointing. Editors Balasubramanian & Greyson’s chops are not sharp enough.
On the whole, Chasing siphons the soul out of you and easily falls in the category of films that are best to be missed.