Unnai Pol Oruvan - but where?

Atlast after 2 weeks of its release, I was able to catch up with UPO. But the josh was definitely missing this time for me, as I had read almost 10 reviews of the film already & had also understood that the movie is a commercial success. Also, I had seen the mind-blowing ‘Wednesday’ a year back & was little skeptical about this entire remake business. Still, it’s a Kamal haasan film & nothing could deter me from watching it in the theater.
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Critics say that a comparing a remake with an original is a blunder & you have watch it without any preset notions. Infact that’s the mindset I had, while entering the movie hall & I wanted to enjoy UPO as an original film. But my mind failed me there completely. ‘Wednesday’ was so impressive that every scene / character still stays intact in my mind & it was utterly impossible for me not to compare UPO with it. So in that context, UPO failed to connect with me the way its original did. Well.. the film is good, no 2 ways about it. But there were far too many glitches & it was surprising as I expected Kamal’s team to eliminate even the minor problems in the hindi version. Instead they got bigger here.
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If you want to copy an important document, then a good photo-copying machine is a must. However great the machine be, there is always going to be some loss of quality where compared to the original & that’s universal. A copy can never be better than the original; it can come closest at the most (Jeyam Raja comes to mind instantly). But when you try to copy an amazing document in an untested machine, then you are asking for disappointment. That untested machine for me is the director of the film, Chakri Toleti. How many times have we seen Kamal Haasan doing this mistake of not picking the right technician? I was stupefied last time when Kamal went to Himesh Reshamaiya for ‘Dasavatharam’ music, as Rahman would have been the right choice & would have elevated the movie to a different level. K.S.Ravikumar is also a bad choice for ‘Dasa’ as he could never give any movie a glossy look, that is so important for a magnum opus like it.
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Take Mahanadhi / Anbe Sivam / KurudhiPunal / Guna & many others; all fantastic films but there was something missing which stops us from calling them as ‘Classics’. That something would have been there, if Kamal had not ghost directed these movies & had entrusted them in some able hands. Not that Kamal’s skill is inferior to any (Virumaandi is a fitting proof), but he tends to go overboard always. Subtleness is not his forte & it would have made a lot of difference to his career as actor / creator, if only he had acquired that particular expertise as well. Its not too late even now.
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Even in UPO, the subtleness of Naseeruddin shah in the original was far more inspiring than the fierceness displayed by Kamal. But when a simple title like ‘Wednesday’ is changed to an heroic ‘ Unnai pol oruvan’, you know what to expect. An unnecessary gun with him, Kamal teaching the bomb squad person abt diffusing bombs, complicated / way too intellectual dialogues are all uncalled for.
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Having said all these things, UPO is path-breaking & could be possible only for the Ulaganayagan. His guts / enthusiasm / fire to do something different everytime is unparalleled in south Indian film history & it shows with his every move. Let me safely conclude by saying that UPO is a fantastic film, if you had not seen ‘Wednesday’ already.
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