Cast: Shaam, Athmiya, Srinath, Sridevi Kumar, Alex
Director: Sarathi
Music Director: Syam Mohan MM
After a long time, I got to clearly witness Las Vegas, its bustling streets, fantastic infrastructure, and not to forget the Highways leading to Boulder City. Kaaviyan takes us on a wonderful tour around Las Vegas in the garb of attempting to tell a story and succeeds only as a tour operator. With respect to the story, it fails to engage you entirely. I didn’t see any reason for the title Kaaviyan because this was nowhere near an epic, nor did Shaam do anything out of the ordinary.
Two cops, Akilan Vishwanathan from the Crime Branch (Shaam) and Baskar from Cyber Crime (Srinath) from Chennai are sent as trainees to Las Vegas. They get embroiled in a case dealing with a psychopath who murders girls for their blood. The movie sticks to a predictable, tried-and-tested storyline and there’s nothing new in the screenplay and has several loopholes. No character is given depth and most of the scenes are illogical, not to mention the climax action sequence where the antagonist Alex is seen dancing with his wife who jumps out of a picture frame.
Elaborate establishment shots, corny dialogues, poor performances, boring soundtracks, this is all the movie offers. Shaam and Srinath attempt to be patriotic with their dialogues, but don’t invoke any such feelings. They answer the not-so-common question as to why the psychopath did what he did by forcefully engaging in a conversation about it at the end of the film.
I only wish that that little effort was directed towards the other issues in the screenplay because honestly, nobody wanted that explanation. There was one badly shot, purposeless song in the film featuring debutant Sridevi Kumar (as Isha Thomas) in the film. She literally just walks around, looks around and caresses her hair. It looks like an attempt at a music video, but only reminded one of Dhinchak Pooja style videos. Per usual all of the predictions as to how events would’ve taken place are done by Shaam, but it is all beyond plausible. He somehow identifies the money bill given by the antagonist, who he has never met, with the smell on it.
It’s been a while since the dubbing of a film has disturbed my watching experience but Kaaviyan fulfills this shortcoming too. Sridevi Kumar’s dubbing was grating and the actor hasn’t attempted to lip-sync with the dialogues either. Post interval, Srinath’s voice is conveniently replaced with someone else’s! The team has also added too many impromptu dialogues and it is evident especially with the scenes involving the Americans in the film.
Recommended
Shaam who makes a comeback after Oru Melliya Kodu (2016) performs well though he isn’t occupying too much screen space. He manages to look good on the frame. Sridevi Kumar who is seen throughout does not emote enough when required (the fake eyelashes only add to the distraction her voice creates). Srinath overplays his notorious character and fails to bring a smile with his bland jokes. Manam Koththi Paravai fame Athmiya (Mathangi in the film) plays the next door Srilankan girl well and the antagonist Alex (Lucifer in the film) does a decent job essaying a psychopath. Syam’s background scores fail miserably and the action sequences by Stun Siva do not justify the action-thriller genre. NS Raajeshkumar’s camera work was flat. Kaaviyan had an illogical plot accompanied by bad performances.
The Kaaviyan review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.