JOIN USShivajinagaraKannada (A) **Director: P N SatyaaCast: Vijay, Parul Yadav, Avinash, Ashish Vidyarthi, Daniel Balaji and others
Kalasipalya came in 2006. Chamarajapet is in the pipeline. Shivajinagara is before the audience. Soon, it will be time for Basavanagudi, Malleswaram, Koramangala, Madiwala, BTM, HSR, HRBR and scores of other layouts to be featured as film titles.
For now, it’s Shivajinagara – a place teeming with sufficiently vast spaces (as shown in the film) to befuddle the born-and-brought-up-here Bangalorean, the area has both fame and notoriety to its credit.
Indeed, imagining a fairly large house with playing space within its compound in this area, again gives some work to jaded brain cells.
After these tiresome thoughts, it is time to watch Vijay in full action glory, particularly after watching the previous week’s release Ugramm.
The range of forms, shapes and sizes of the ‘weapons’ used by the City’s underbelly (as shown in the film) is impressive – care to teach more violent crime, anybody? Likewise is the word given by some filmmakers claiming zero obscene content in their films. After all, showing cleavage and more, round, firm legs into something else and navels surgically ‘designed’ while the ‘poor, virtuous’ guys are clad from neck to toe – worse than mothers who have newly delivered babies, has already become passe! Beauty, of course, shall remain subjective.
A middle-class guy with simple tastes and an overdose of anger against an unjust society is forced to protect his near-absent father from Shivajinagar’s notorious gangsters. In doing so, he loses his love, only to get it back, courtesy an astonishingly golden-hearted cop who’s married the girl (impressive debut by Adithya Menon).
Shivajinagara is peppered with family sentiment, college romance and some “action” utterly devoid of shame and related feelings – cruelty relished to the hilt. Again, sound design overpowers the dialogues, which have plenty of punch lines delivered by Vijay with the sculpted body and slick moves. Parul Yadav joins several other heroines of such testosterone orgies, her silent dignity barely visible. Imitating Rakshitha a la Hubballi doesn’t help much alas!
The supporting cast is good led by Daniel Balaji. Selvam and Arjun Janya are good while Jessie could have done better. Shivajinagara can be hailed for one not-so-obvious thing: Fruits and vegetables avoid getting caught in violence of any kind in the whole film. Where is the need when there are more than 320 humans available for carving, slicing, chopping, mincing, etc?
Vijay fans won’t be disappointed for sure.