Maamannan Movie Review: An okayish, but hardly potent ...

Maamannan Movie Synopsis: An MLA and his son, who are from oppressed community, are forced to stand up against the privileged, arrogant scion of a late politician, who is determined to make them bow down to him.

Maamannan Movie Review: Mari Selvaraj's Maamannan begins with shots that cross-cut between two violent events. One of these involves Rathnavelu (Fahadh Faasil), the scion of a late politician (Azhagamperumal) from a dominant caste, who is putting down his prized dog that has lost a race. On the other hand, we get Adiveeran (Udhayanidhi Stalin), a martial arts trainer and the son of MLA Maamannan (Vadivelu), who belongs to the oppressed caste, initiating a fight between two of his students. With these, the director shows us the difference between violence against the defenseless and violence against oppression. The latter is almost a reiteration of the message that the director delivered with his previous film, Karnan - agitation is sometimes the only way out against oppression.

But Maamannan actually harks back to the optimism that can be seen in the director's debut film, Pariyerum Perumal. The film wants to show us that it is possible to create change by trusting our democratic set-up.

As in Karnan, the conflict initially begins at a smaller level, when Rathnavelu's money-minded brother (Sunil Reddy), who is running a group of educational institutions, goes after a coaching class run by Leela (Keerthy Suresh) and her college friends. They have been using the premises of the martial arts school run by Adiveeran, their college friend, who has offered them the place. When the institute gets ransacked, Adiveeran retaliates, which brings Rathnavelu and Maamannan into the picture and snowballs into a larger conflict about power, prestige and domination.

The first half of Maamannan has everything we have come to expect from a Mari Selvaraj film - shocking scenes of oppression in the form of violence against defenseless men and animals, long-lasting guilt, a tender romantic track, inhuman villainism, and defiant heroism that makes one to hoot and whistle. The director doesn't disappoint us in effectively portraying these. The actors, too, are solid. Vadivelu never once comes across as the comedian we have seen all these years, and feels so close to life.

It is when he pushes the scope of the narrative to a larger framework that the film's dramatic potency gets diluted. The second half becomes a political power game between an oppressor who wants the status quo to remain and the oppressed who believe democratic victory will solve their problems (and that of their brethren). But these portions lack intensity and even begin to move into realms of social fantasy. From being a character to be feared, Rathnavelu turns into someone who is as unsure about his standing as the two men he is after. Maamannan's pacifism starts looking like political naiveté while Adiveeran's actions begin to mirror that of a typical commercial film hero. And Mari Selvaraj joins the list of filmmakers whose ambitions got the better of them with their third film.