Navarasa Thilagam (2016)

Navarasa Thilagam is yet another glorification of the wastrel. It has yet another TV personality-turned-actor playing the lead. And, yet another educated heroine character falls for this uneducated, unambitious guy, who proudly proclaims to his friend his only goal in life is to make 16 babies with this girl! If there is an honorary membership to the Varuthapadatha Valibar Sangam, this guy will be the top contender for it. 'Ore deal-u oho-nu life-u' is Moorthy's (Ma Ka Pa Anand) philosophy in life. A school dropout with a bar owner for a father (Ilavarasu), Moorthy wishes to make it big as real estate developer but mostly whiles his time away. And when does try something, his naive attempts only get him into more trouble. He chances upon Chitra (Srushti Dange) at a railway station and instantly realises that he has to marry her. So, with his friend Alangaram (Karunakaran) in tow, he tries to woo the girl. But her father sees through his motives and manages to keep him away. So, he befriends Thirunavukkarasu (Siddharth Vipin), a two-faced ration store employee, who is about to get engaged to Chitra's sister. However, on the day of the engagement, he learns of a family truth and halts the event, and this only angers Chitra's father (Jayaprakash) further. Will he be able to marry the girl of his dreams? A derivative film that borrows a lot from the films of Sundar C, Ezhil and Ponram (every scene reminds you of something you might have seen in another film), Navarasa Thilagam is a film that thinks of itself as a comedy while not making an effort to be one. The writing is quite bland (there is zero effort in building up the central romantic track) and the narrative predictable (we even get a hapless 'foreign mapillai'), and it is left to the cast to shore up the film. Ma Ka Pa, to his credit, tries hard to make us believe that he is the low-budget producer's Sivakarthikeyan, but Karunakaran is wasted in the role of a comedy sidekick, with the script never letting the character do anything substantial. The only wisecrack he is allowed is in the scene when the hero tells him his life's ambition. Meanwhile, Siddharth Vipin is once again given a kid-adult fat guy character, and he tries gamely to play the fool, but for how long can we pretend that a fat guy farting or a character reading Sidney Sheldon as Chutney Sheldon is funny?