Maaveeran HD Released

 

Like in his debut film, Mandela, Madonne Ashwin mixes humour and social commentary to great effect in Maaveeran, which has a plot that is fairly routine, that is enlivened by its fantasy element.

The film begins with a gentrification move by the government, which results in a slum-dwelling community, including the protagonist Sathya (Sivakarthikeyan), being forced to shift to a flat. Soon enough, they realise that the flat has been poorly built. Door handles start coming off, the paint starts peeling off the walls and cracks appear at the slightest pressure.
But Sathya, a cartoonist, is the kind of guy who tells his quick-to-protest mother (Saritha) "adjust panni vaazha kathukanum". By a quirky turn of events, Sathya begins to hear the voice of the lead character from his cartoon strip - a daring warrior - urging him to act according to his whims and fight for the people. And Sathya ends up earning the wrath of minister MN Jeyakodi (Mysskin), whose corruption is responsible for the poor build quality of the flat.

Can this cowardly cartoonist find the superhero within him and save his people from a disaster that's waiting to happen?
While Maaveeran feels like a template commercial entertainer on the surface, right in the beginning, Madonne Ashwin assures us that we are in the hands of a capable filmmaker, who is giving his own touch to familiar material. Take the scene where the slum dwellers evacuate the land they have lived on for ages to move to the newly built flat. While most filmmakers would have tried to milk the emotional aspect of this moment, this director keeps it lowkey while ensuring that we understand the emotional weight of this move.

He peppers the first half with social commentary that's sharp and witty. His use of Yogi Babu, who plays a labourer hired to do patch works at the building, is superb. The character is a Tamil worker who realises that his job is being taken over by migrant workers from North India, who come cheaper and do not question the orders of their employers.

The fantasy element does have a whiff of what we have seen earlier in films like Tughlaq Durbar, and Madonne Ashwin doffs his hat to that by using that film's lead, Vijay Sethupathi, as the voice of the cartoon that Sathya draws.

While the first half moves along at a fast clip with entertaining moments that make us break into a smile every now and then, the film's momentum slips up in the latter half. The laughs become a trickle, and the film kind of turns into hero service, with extended action blocks that become tiresome after a point. Also, after a lot of build up, the antagonist's character gets diluted. We get that the director wants to draw parallels between the protagonist and the antagonist - if one hears an unseen voice dictating his actions, the other has a voice directing him, literally, in flesh and blood, in the form of a childhood friend (Suneel Varma)! While this seems an interesting idea on paper, it doesn't translate that well on screen. A rescue attempt in the climax also feels forced.