This time, Ranjith uses Rajinikanth the Superstar to tell his message — land is the common man’s right. The story is simple… Migrants from Tamil Nadu settle in Dharavi and help build it, and run the city. When an evil politician-cum-land mafia don sets his eyes on their land, they revolt.

This time, Ranjith uses Rajinikanth the Superstar to tell his message — land is the common man’s right. The story is simple… Migrants from Tamil Nadu settle in Dharavi and help build it, and run the city. When an evil politician-cum-land mafia don sets his eyes on their land, they revolt.

After an uneven first half that takes its own sweet time to set up the high-concept premise, Tubelight finds some sure footing in the latter half, with the romance between Ram and Hema, which somewhat has the feel of a modern-day Sollamale. For how long can Ram hide his condition from the girl, and what kind of challenges does this pose? And the entry of a character from Ram’s not-so-distant past adds to the tension.

It has been a while since we had a film whose twists and double twists were genuinely surprising and in 24, we are kept slightly off-guard as to what might happen when a character does something. Vikram Kumar doesn’t sacrifice the internal logic of the story, so the twists always seem plausible and surprising.

Aarathu Sinam is not a frame-by-frame remake unlike many of the recent Malayalam remakes and some of the changes that the director has made to the plot work and make better sense in the context of the milieu where he sets his story.

The tension in the script gets killed and the film never recovers, despite making an effort to recover lost ground.

…to Arunkumar’s credit, there is hardly any lull in the film for us to start thinking about such niggles, and we just go along on this entertaining ride.

Even though the execution is off, the haunting song that Imman provides for this moment, Mirutha Mirutha, hits us hard, and makes us care for the lead pair.

Surprisingly, this remake works to a large extent (if you haven’t seen the original, even better), because the director, Bommarillu Bhaskar hasn’t made any drastic change to the original script and manages to capture the emotional drama of the scenes.

Despite toeing so closely to the original’s formula and being equally unpretentious, Aranmanai-2 feels underwhelming. The comedy is less funny (Soori takes over from Santhanam here) and the horror scenes not even remotely scary (though, the visual effects continue to be tacky). The cast and the director seem to be coasting along with a ‘people will see this movie no matter what’ attitude, and it is this blatant acknowledgment of the film being just a cash grab that is most disappointing.