Ji Review

The Tamil appetite for political drama seems insatiable. With Ji (basis of nomenclature still completely unknown) comes another saga of the corrupt politician and the idealistic youth who stands up against his ruthless and formidable forces.

If only the directors desisted from wantonly throwing in action as the one-size-fits-all answer to all the disputes. But there seems to be a highly tappable, seething desire in the audiences to see the despotic politician thrashed, beaten, injured, burnt. Either in the audiences or in the director, that is. Any which way, the movie has a nauseating excess of violence and gore that passes by in an unintelligible blur. That's the case unfortunately for the major part of the movie. The minor part is a little, predictable story that provides the justification.

Vasu (Ajith) is a third-year college student living a happy-go-lucky life when his friends force him to stand in the student chairman elections. The local MLA's son is contesting too, and wants Vasu out. One thing leads to another, and after being forcibly ousted from the college elections, Vasu does a Yuva, and decides to stand in the public ones. In between all this is Bhuvana (Trisha), a slip of a girl in a slip of a role. She wears a uniform half-sari to school, rides a cycle and flirts demurely with him. That's her entire job description in the 3-hour movie.

If that seems like too simplistic a story to stretch into a full-length (1½ times that rather) feature film, well, that's where the action comes in. Between every two lines in the above paragraph occurs a scene of mob fighting, stabbing, crude-bomb flinging and lashing with chains and pestles. Simple.

Trisha is completely unnecessary in the movie, and while she has perfected the art of playing the tender, bashful beauty, her role is completely stagnant here. There are too many, unnecessary, badly-dubbed songs that increase the running time. After a point it becomes a torture watching Ji, because the glaringly obvious denouement just isn't happening and the fillers are drop-dead boring. It's like a guy coming to propose to a woman who knows it, and just beating around the bush, stuttering and stammering for hours together, while she is gnashing her teeth for him to just spit it out.

The movie begins with the flashback, and that is another part of the torture. There are a hundred moments when you feel it can simply end right now, but the flashback reminds you there is some way to go till you get to the point where it started. Without the anesthetic effect of uncertainty to numb the constant speculation of when the end will come, it's like going through surgery with full consciousness. Awareness trauma, they call it.

Well, that's about it. Another movie that won't have a long way to go in the theaters. Stay away from it without any regrets. If you think you are missing something, just check out some posters of Ajith and Trisha on the net. Apart from these two lead actors, whose previous movies keep them recognizable in the public mind, there is nothing in the movie you will ever remember.