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H Vinoth’s latest release Valimai, with Ajith in the lead, is winning praise for its amazing stunt sequences. However, the film’s lack of a solid script, particularly as it careens into an unintentional parody in the second half, has come as a huge disappointment. Remove the wonderfully shot action scenes and background score, and we’re left with a film that falls back on jaded cliches and poorly written dialogues. It’s true that Valimai, despite the bad reviews and word of mouth, has managed to notch up good figures at the box-office over the weekend (if trade numbers are to be believed, it has raked in Rs 100 crore worldwide in three days), but the question remains — why do directors indulge in lazy writing and depend on the star to take the film home?
Stars like Ajith have a massive fanbase that is unaffected by box-office success or failure. This means that producers are willing to invest several crores on their films as long as the star has agreed to come on board. The producers don’t have to worry about whether the film will get a favourable release date, sufficient screens, or an audience to watch it show after show. Television and OTT rights fetch them a pretty sum too. But increasingly, a lot of star vehicles are proving to be completely empty of ideas, depending solely on fans who will watch the film no matter what and promote it out of their love for the star. For instance, Rajinikanth’s Annaatthe which came out for Deepavali last year, and was directed by Siva, is another star vehicle that arrived with great fanfare but ended up being an eminently forgettable film. With an age-old story, uninspiring characterisation and gaping holes in the plot, the film was a misfire even if some industry trackers claimed that it had made over Rs 200 crore worldwide.
Vikram is another star who has been struggling to find a good script. His last outing Mahaan had a messy second half that pandered way too much to showcasing Dhruv Vikram’s histrionics and didn’t really sink its teeth into the premise of a man forced into Gandhism, but at least, it was a much better effort than previous damp squibs like Kadaram Kondan, the overly loud Saamy Square and the pointless Sketch.
The problem is not limited to the Tamil film industry. Take Mohanlal’s Aarattu which came out a week before Valimai. Directed by B Unnikrishnan, the film is a mishmash of Mohanlal’s old hits, and is bereft of any originality. The storyline is old, predictable and executed badly. Prabhas’s Saaho, directed by Sujeeth, was made on a whopping budget of Rs 350 crore, and was released in over 10,000 screens worldwide. Like Valimai, the film had several well-made action sequences but the story was nothing to write home about. Considering it was Prabhas’s first film after the Baahubali franchise, it enjoyed a massive opening across the country, but left the audience disappointed with its bad writing.
It is mind-boggling that filmmakers put so little thought into the plot, the spine of the film, and blow up a whole lot of money on flashy stunts and superlative production values instead. Valimai is about a middle class police officer, Arjun Kumar (Ajith), whose unemployed younger brother, Kutty, gets drawn into the world of drugs and crime. The younger brother, fuelled by the chief villain, ends up going against his older brother, putting their family in jeopardy. This sounds like an exciting premise, but the film’s focus is entirely on the bike stunts featuring the hero and the villain, and the story is barely convincing. The development of the film may have been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic but that’s no excuse for the insipid writing that relies heavily on ‘Amma’ sentiment to sell it.
Vijay, Ajith’s rival in the Tamil film industry, has been smarter when it comes to script selection and directors. Though his films carry a number of star vehicle tropes — from the elaborate hero introduction sequence to punch dialogues and extravagant dance numbers — they come with reasonably strong ideas and the execution varies from decent to good, barring a few missteps. Vijay has also prioritised entertainment over karuthu (where Suriya often stumbles), not going too heavy-handed on the messaging. These films may not make for great cinema but they’re mostly in the paisa vasool category.
All stars have bad films in their filmography — films with silly ideas, problematic messaging, bad acting, etc — and that cannot be helped. What is concerning is that these recent star vehicles are not just bad, they are plain lazy. They take the audience for granted, and the screenplay seems to be a collection of scenes to establish how young the star looks, how fast he can walk, how stylishly he can dance, how well he can ride a bike and so on. There is nothing to hold the story together because the script is lying by the wayside. Most of these films are pegged around ‘gangsters’ because it’s the easy solution to have the hero bashing up a bunch of people to showcase his masculinity. The script doesn’t bother delving into the crimes, how they’re carried out, or even attempt to come up with a characterisation for the pivotal roles. Nobody expects a ‘mass’ film to be completely logical, and the audience can buy into the illusion of a lone man beating up 20 people at the same time. But the demand now is that the audience should not expect any logic whatsoever, even in the plotting. The ‘messaging’ is whatever happens to be trending at the time; it was ‘farmers’ for the longest time in Tamil cinema and now, having run out of steam on that one, it appears to be a return to good old family sentiment with zero updates reflecting contemporary times.
Writing and directing are two different skills (Mari Selvaraj, M Manikandan are among the few contemporary directors who can do both well) but directors who make star vehicles appear to be convinced that they don’t have to invest in a writer who can actually flesh out the story and do a good job of it because the star is there to plug all weaknesses. Fans, in order to prove their loyalty, engage in social media battles, boasting about the supposed crores made by these films, pitting one star against the other. Such a discourse around a release only adds to the already prevalent notion that a star is enough to sell a film and nothing else matters.
The stars we love today were once upcoming actors who worked their way to the top by doing good films that managed to make an impact on the audience. They picked solid, entertaining scripts that made the audience come back for more. Is it that their hunger to do something new and different has disappeared? Whenever a big star’s new release is panned by critics, indignant fans and film industry people ask them to think about the ‘hard work’ and money invested in the project. The question is, why aren’t fans and film industry people thinking about this too? Before sinking crores into a project, shouldn’t filmmakers at least come up with a decent script, and shouldn’t stars who have spent decades in this industry respect the audience enough to demand better? Unfortunately, celebrating mediocrity is only going to generate more and more of these lazy star vehicles, never mind how many crores the film reportedly made from Earth to Neptune.