Vizhi Moodi Yosithaal Movie Review

Synopsis: A young man tries to avenge the murder of his lover — and also save the nation — by hunting down the men who killed her.

Movie Review: Is Vizhi Moodi Yosithaal part-autobiography and part-fantasy of its director KG Senthil Kumar? The film’s hero also has this name, and half the film revolves around the college days of the hero, in which we get the usual campus hijinks — ragging, beer, buddies, romance… in essence the whole lot. This is the kind of film that thinks that it is cool when it has a mother (Oorvasi in a thankless role) who asks the son to fall in love, and father who shares a drink with his son.

Then, there is the other film — a thriller involving ESP, terrorists and murder. This segment also owes a lot to the Nicolas Cage-starrer Next. Like the hero in that film, here, Senthil Kumar can see the future — not in a Nostradamus way but Senthil can see things five minutes earlier before they happen; in the Hollywood film, it was two minutes.

As for the plot, it goes like this: Senthil falls in love with his classmate Nikki (who is speech-impaired) and after the usual bit of friendship and romance, the two, along with their friends, go to a forest to make a short film. However, Nikki sees some men involved in some clandestine activity and goes to find out and predictably, get caught. This is in 2005. The film intercuts between this storyline and another, which takes places in 2013. Senthil is murdering a few men one by one and we are told that these are the people who murdered Nikki and they are terrorists trying to pull off a major operation to cripple India. But little do they realize that Senthil and his precognitive ability stand in their way.

Even at two hours, Vizhi Moodi Yosithaal feels long. Too much time is wasted on building the romance (as a contrast, look at Ghajini) and the college moments are neither special nor necessary — like the indifferently staged beer festival that provides the opportunity for a guest appearance (by Power Star Srinivasan), and the manufactured conflict between the lovers. The ESP angle comes a bit too late in the film and it is used mainly in a couple scenes — where Senthil and his friends escape unharmed while tailing the terrorists, and the other, when he guesses the terror plot days before it happens (the logic of him able to see only five minutes earlier is simply brushed away). All that we wish is that a little more thought had gone into these elements which could have turned this underwhelming film into a nail-biting thriller.