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Join UsStar Cast: Dhanush, Samyuktha Menon, Samuthirakani, Sai Kumar, and ensemble.
Director: Venky Atluri.
What’s Good: Dhanush steals the show in a film that is simple, intriguing, and entertaining at the same time while giving a message.
What’s Bad: The film entirely forgets the initial story it set out to tell. What about that?
Loo Break: Dhanush makes sure you don’t take one with his talent and the narrative in the second half gets interesting enough to not let you.
Watch or Not?: If you are a Dhanush fan, you have no reason not to. The film is a simple entertaining watch that also tries to educate, you can give it a try.
Language: Tamil (with subtitles in selected screens, mostly PVR).
Available on: In Theatres Near You & Soon On Netflix.
Runtime: 139 Minutes.
User Rating:
An assistant teacher from a very big private institute is assigned to teach in a rural school as the institute plan to show their goodwill. Little does the corrupt head of the said institute knows that the teacher will equip the students of the rural school to top the exams and excel even more than his city children. The drama unfolds later in the film.
Vaathi Movie Review: Script Analysis
Vaathi might be the most trending word in the nation’s Tamil vocabulary for the past year. Thanks to Thalapathy Vijay’s Master and the widely popular song. With Dhanush coming to the big screens with a film with the same word, it was surely an intriguing factor. Unlike how the project is being promoted, the movie is otherwise. It is simple, the story is relatable and there is too much of emotions riding on it. But does the film stand true to what it promises?
Written by Venky Atluri, Vaathi is a film that at large wants to take down the privatisation of the education system. The film wants to educate people about the importance of education, and make them believe that only academics can make people think better and away from the orthodox system that we are conditioned to live in. The writing manages to address it all as the story progresses. One must appreciate the fact that how Venky makes sure that all the weight doesn’t overburden his product. The filmmakers manages to pay an homage to the craze of the star he has in his movie and also make him do what he intends to.
The filmmaker skillfully writes his story as the simplest blueprint. While setting most of it in the flashback, he doesn’t risk jumping timelines often. He stays in the past for a very big chunk without coming back to the present at all. This kind of levels the film. There is a message, serious conversation, and some brutal truth coming right at you. But at no point, the film turns preachy or stop entertaining. Atluri adds enough of Dhanush USP panache to his recipe and time and again gives the actor sequences that fans crave. He balances out the seriousness and drama of the subject pretty well.
But one cannot ignore the fact that writing while focusing on the past, forgets the present completely. The story that the writer sets out to tell about the present and how a boy is not that great at studies stumbles upon a box of footages from the past. The film completely forgets to address this and gives him a conclusion.
Vaathi Movie Review: Star Performance
Dhanush can do no wrong. The actor with his little frame beams maximum power in a movie that has all the actors larger in frame than him. There is comfort in how he embraces all his characters. Bala Murugan is a boy who ends up being a pawn to the powerful but he chooses to shine separately. The actor manages to make you feel the pain that he goes through and his struggle he does to give the children access to education.
Samyuktha Menon gets to play a stereotypical part that is always in service of the leading man Bala. She has no life beyond being around Dhanush’s character. All the actors who play students do a very fine job in their respective parts and make the movie a very good experience.
Vaathi Movie Review: Direction, Music
Venky Atluri in his direction quite cleverly understands that he has to make his movie around Dhanush in a way that his message is conveyed and the audience is entertained too. But the filmmaker has some explaining to do. How is Bala teaching Maths, Physics, and Chemistry single-handedly? In a scene when there are no students attending the classes, Dhanush sits besides buffaloes and reads out from the books to them. Why does this school have buffaloes?
The music is quite good but is limited to the movie and doesn’t have a bigger recall value. Camera work by Dinesh Krishnan and J Yuvaraj is pretty interesting. While the colour tone bothers me a bit, they use it well.
Vaathi Movie Review: The Last Word
Vaathi is a simple film that does its job well and entertains too. Give this one a chance.
Vaathi Trailer
Vaathi releases on 17 February, 2023.
Share with us your experience of watching Vaathi.
For more recommendations, read on our Thunivu Movie Review here.
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