Massu Engira Maasilamani Review

The initial portions are quite ghastly. The editing is frantic. It’s as if the editor guessed that we’d grow impatient with the extremely generic nature of the goings-on and knew that we’d end up fast-forwarding these scenes on the DVD anyway, so he decided to save us the trouble with an editing pattern that resembles fast-forwarding. Scenes whiz by. If you’d asked me, early on, what was happening, I’d have said… Mass (Suriya, playing, well, Suriya) is a conman. He loves Malini. There are some vague bad men. There’s an attempt at a joke about the composer S. A. Rajkumar. There’s another attempt at a joke when an overweight woman is referred to as Kung Fu Panda. A commissioner is killed by someone… But who and why? All that will have to wait. Right now, the film is just warming up.

But when the supernatural element kicks in, there’s finally something to hold on to. These scenes are still badly staged, and the tone is all over the place — but at least there’s a sense of things going somewhere. Of course, it helps if you stop thinking about things like writing and execution. When watching an innings from Scotland, you have to be happy with the occasional single.

It’s only in the last hour or so that Massu begins to score. Venkat Prabhu may like to think he’s a prankster, but his film works best when he hunkers down to deliver hardcore drama, with a paranormal twist on Aboorva Sagodharargal. (Suriya plays a second role as well.) It’s a pity that the screenplay has spent so much time fooling around instead of imbuing the characters with depth and dimension, because this stretch could have really been something, had we been emotionally involved with their plight. But maybe there are too many characters to begin caring about. The cast includes Karunas, Rajendran, Sriman, Riyaz Khan, Samuthirakani and Radhakrishnan Parthiban — all of them underutilised. And Brahmanandam plays a small role so Telugu viewers can find comfort in a familiar face.

Like a benevolent Santa, the overlong Massu tries to have something for every segment of the audience. Kids are going to love the scene where Mass smiles at a schoolchild after signing a report card filled with zeroes. International audiences will love the bit where someone, after listening to the Sri Lankan lilt in the second Suriya’s Tamil, asks, “Ceylon-a?” and Suriya shakes his head and says, “Thamizhan.” The weak-bladdered will heartily embrace the unimaginative and drawn-out action sequences. (The songs, too, in the theatre I was in.) As for fun-loving family audiences, what do I pick? The scenes of drinking at a TASMAC bar? The beeped-out F-word? The stretch where a mother and her little girl are burnt alive? The film’s U-certificate may be its spookiest accomplishment.