‘Kodiyil Oruvan’ movie review: A silly drama that neither gets its ‘mass’ right nor its politics

The Vijay Antony-starrer is loud, mostly boring and has a soft-spoken, kind-hearted hero at the centre, who seemed to have been written not on a white paper, but on tile

I would like to draw all your attention towards what could be one of the fantastically-put together hero introduction songs in the recent past. I only ask for 20 seconds of your time.

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In under 10 minutes in Kodiyil Oruvan, we get a song about the hero with snapshots from his everyday life, that not just spells out for the audience what a gold-hearted and diamond-footed hero Tamil cinema has never seen (duh!), but screams it instead. In Nee Kaanum Kanave, we get a glimpse — and literally so — of Vijaya Raghavan (Vijay Antony), as he goes about his everyday chores on a bicycle. Now the obvious, natural and instinctive question that may arise in your mind is, what’s so markedly different about this song in particular... don’t most of Tamil cinema’s mass narratives have these? The answer is a resounding NO.