Santosh Subramanian – Review

For those who don’t know the history behind this movie , Santosh Subramanian is the Tamil remake of a Telugu Blockbuster movie called Bommarilu. Surprisingly , I have watched the latter , which is exactly why I wanted to review the former, yet another remake in Tamil Cinema that basks the glory of somebody else’s hard work.

In short , let me describe what Bommarilu was all about. Bommarilu was a classy product of genuine talents getting together and synchronizing beautifully. Sidharth’s performance was utterly natural and touching and he enhanced his claims as a potential top class method actor. Genelia typified the girl that the script writer must have had in mind and Prakash Raj was at his coolest self. All this combined with some neat supporting roles , colorful and solid cinematography , young and refreshing music and insightful direction made up Bommarilu !

Now, if you take a DVD of Bommarilu, sit and watch it relentlessly for days and weeks. Memorize every shot in it , every scene in it , every prop used , every reaction produced , every production value that went in it and reproduce it in a matter of few months in the Tamil Celluloid , then you get Santosh Subramanian !

We come to the elusive question then . Should we give credit and time to such a product ? Yes , it is entertaining and yes there must be a vast majority in the Tamil Audience who wouldn’t have seen Bommarilu and therefore would thoroughly enjoy Santosh Subramanian as it will be a novel idea to them. I’m not gonna discredit any success this movie attains as come what may , a movie is a movie irrespective of the ethical questions and if it’s entertaining enough in the end and churns out success at the box office , then fair do’s because you are talking about hundreds of people’s work getting rewarded ! Not just Raja or Ravi .

I’m talking about the credit given after a movie’s success has been guaranteed. The report card individuals get for their performances post release. Here ,we can certainly vent our frustrations at the candidates who ripped other people’s idea. So I’m going to first take it on Raja for acting like a businessman than a director. Anybody could have done what he did ! All they would have needed is a proxy director , loads of money to buy the original movie’s remake rights and that’s it. I don’t understand what satisfaction Raja gets by churning out remakes after remakes that does not exhibit one single talent of his !

The bigger enemy in all this is “Jayam” Ravi. He has spoken in sify.com about how happy he was with the outcome of the movie , his performance and all that jazz. Here we have a man who did everything from copying tje cheek bone movement of Sidharth to his body language but unfortunately , he couldn’t recreate the same magic because of his squeaky voice ( thank god Sidharth strength was his sweet down to earth voice ). For people who didn’t see Bommarilu , Ravi must have looked like the next Maddy with his fake smiles, sweet one liners and chirpy moments with Genelia.

The overall bad taste of this movie didn’t help the cause when I was judging Genelia for her replica of the original role ! The dialogs in Tamil were so irritating when she spoke that I felt I could tolerate the incomprehensible telugu dialogs itself , as those seemed a lot more natural . But for those who didn’t watch the original and who have watched a lot of the stereo typed masala movies , Genelia’s role must have come as a breath of fresh air.

Prakash Raj was very oppressed in his role for some reason. I could not sense the freedom he had in Bommarilu. But then again , I’m getting too critical and If I look at it from a neutral point of view , someone who is seeing S.S for the first time , Prakash Raj would have pulled of a professional performance that we have come to expect from him at this level.

It’s laughable to see Kausalya turn up for such laughable roles while Sadogappan Ramesh makes a mockery of a debut. They look like a herd of lamb waiting to be slaughtered. The only people claiming some good credit from the supporting cast was the talented Geetha and M.S Bhaskar. Santhanam fails to make the most of a good opportunity like how he did in the previous remake of the same crew and I think people are fed up with Premji these days.

Getting into the Music now , Devi Sri Prasad has used the same numbers from Telugu , so you could not help but like the album as they were blockbusters originally. All his songs were good enough to be part of a commercial hit movie in the current trend and his BGM was the icing on the cake. Wonder why he does not produce the same content for Tamil Movies !

The camera work were based on the original , therefore I find it pointless analyzing it. The editing suited the norms of a romantic entertainer with no major draw backs that you could point out in a review. The set and locations used were pretty much the same and I think you can predict the rest of the movie/review on your by now.

To sum it up, Raja achieved his objective this movie as It’s a perfect romantic entertainer that will attract the audience for weeks. But his objective in his career is still far fetched and he will go down in my books as a nobody if he continues to make these remakes to give his brother a living.