At the heart of it, Yaar Ivan is an interesting thriller that focusses more on the how and the why instead of being a regular whodunit. But due to commercialisation, or in this case, over-commercialisation, the end product ends up being half-baked.

Cast: Sachiin Joshi, Esha Gupta, Kishore, Prabhu
Director: Tatineni Satya

Here’s an example. In one scene, while playing kabaddi,  a man picks up another and swirls him around his head with one hand, like he were a karlakattai. It reminded me of the scene from Villadhi Villain where a character holds thin air imagining it to be a dumbbell. It makes for an unintendedly funny scene, with the actual comedy scenes rarely hitting their mark. Also, it’s high time filmmakers stopped using transgender people as a source of humour. It’s crass, insensitive and anything but funny.

Yaar Ivan is a Tamil-Telugu bilingual, and perhaps may end up with more takers among the Telugu audience. But, I think even they’d find all the masala in this film too much to handle. A cool-as-a-cucumber hero, a cigar-wielding villain, a rich villain with a criminal background, a heroine who doesn’t get any screen space, despite supposedly being a major player, you name it, you’ve got it all. Not to mention the terrible lip-sync that’s such a big, annoying feature in bilinguals these days, and the pesky ‘localisation’ of the dialogues.

But there’s more to Yaar Ivan than meets the eye. Beneath all those layers of triteness, a horrible love angle, people flying around in the name of playing kabaddi, lies an intriguing plot about a murder. The cinematography is top-notch, with the slow-mo scenes looking delightful. Thaman’s music works for the most part, except one out-of-place item number.