Aayirathil Oruvan

One of the leading ladies in this filmathon pisses in a pot. Another woman squirts blood from a breast. Yet another sings a ditty about wallowing in crap. What crap indeed!

At one point, the man of the moment, Karthi, asks: “What the hell is going on here?”
No one has a clue. If director Selvaraghavan has any, he doesn’t show it.

Parthiban, who looks like a latter-day Idi Amin, pouts, grimaces, scratches his armpit and after a pause breaks into verse.

What could be worse? The scenes teem with dark gooks and goblins. They hit each other, they scream, screech, howl, growl and bawl. Nobody knows who is on whose side.

Apparently, a Chola prince and his rag-tag of subjects fled the kingdom in Tamil Nadu’s Tanjore area 800 years ago. A hunt on is on to find that lost civilisation. ]Leading the expedition are an archaeologist’s daughter, Lavanya (Andrea) and Reema Sen (Anitha Pandian).

The archaeologist himself had gone into thin air while on the Chola trail. Anitha, it turns out, is herself a Pandya. With the backing of a Central minister, an ex-major and a handful of others, she sets out to avenge injustice and bring back a family deity.

They go all the way to some isle in Vietnam. For some time you are led to believe that the guy is holed up in snake and leech-infested jungles. But suddenly, we find ourselves in desert country. Quirky sense of geography this!

Mayhem unfolds in what could be Mohenjo Daro country, Hampi or the ruins of nowhere. Machine guns to the left, boulder missiles to the right. Doesn’t matter. Like the rest of this graphics and digital torture, the title does little to justify the original. The MGR flick was quite watchable despite the matinee idol’s jumping-Jack style.

The only thing that gives you some relief is G V Prakash’s music. The songs are pulsating.
It’s a disastrous second outing for Karthi. Except for the initial scenes where he is breezy with his rakishness, he looks lost among the barbarians. To make matters worse are his leading ladies, the wooden-faced Reema and Andrea.

They look like three idiots without the i-quotient.

Selva gives a parting kick: the Chola’s journey will be continued. One wag commented: Oh, not again!