Sivaji: The Boss – The Review

Before I begin with the review, an obligatory nod to Rajni Mania. In its second week, Sivaji: The Boss is currently playing in 7 PVR screens in the NCR and that’s just PVR. So when I found out that Priya had ditched Fantastic Four 2 for Sivaji, I immediately dropped plans of going “sight-seeing” in CP. I got a North Indian friend of mine to come along, promising him a delightful treat for his eyes. At the theatre I was in for a surprise. Every week that I have been in Delhi, without fail I have watched a new movie on the weekend. But never had I seen them booked full. Even more surprisingly, there were guys loafing around the ticket counter selling tickets at 150-200 Rs. (Theatres these days don’t mind people selling their tickets in the black or what?) Luckily five minutes before the show we found a black marketer desperate enough to get the tickets off his hands for Rs 100. The hall was filled with maddus and half-blood maddus. Loud cheers, whistles and claps went up as the trailer for ‘Sultan’ was shown first. My shell-shocked friend asked me, “What is wrong with these people?” I grinned back, “Wait till they show Rajni’s face on the screen for the first time.”

Talking about the movie, it has a script that is logical and coherent enough for the audiences to ignore it and concentrate on what they have come to enjoy – Rajni and his mannerisms. The script doesn’t offer much by way of originality, compared to say Chandramukhi. (I haven’t seen Chandramukhi yet, but I would imagine that any half-decent remake of Manichitrathazhu would have a better script than Sivaji. Rajni, as always is stellar, or is it super-stellar? And Shreya Sarin, these days, does wonderful things to me in my dreams. I don’t think any other actress could have pulled off the sexy in traditional and hardly-there costumes, the way she has. Again, I haven’t seen too many Rajni movies, but this one had the best comedy routines of the ones that I had seen. What also works for the movie is the constant references to previous movies of Shankar and Rajni. Raghuvaran’s appearance on screen was greeted with a huge cheer. How brilliant would it have been if they could have gotten Ramya Krishnan also to do a guest appearance?

Shankar has also tried his best to keep absurd and Newton’s-laws-defying stunts to a minimum, the most absurd ones being relegated to lavishly set songs. But there is one particular stunt scene that begs to be derided. The scene at the drive-in movie, where Rajni literally pummels at least 8-10 other cars with his SUV as if they were merely cardboard models. Ram-go-pee in his review mentioned how the common refrain among reviewers had been “80 crore Rs and they couldn’t buy themselves a script.” I say, “80 crore Rs and they couldn’t get better special effects in this sequence.” Surprisingly for a Rajni movie, this was to me the only major WTF moment. And if I had to nitpick about the script, I might mention how Shankar tends to over-simplify things. For example, he would have you believe that black money is the root cause of all our troubles. But these are minor inconveniences, mind you. In all, the Thalaivar himself summed up the movie when he said, “Coool!”