The title, Avalukkenna Azhagiya Mugam, makes you wonder about the lack of agency the leading ladies (there are four of them) have in a story that shows them mainly as pretty faces. There are also four leading men, but only Krishna (Poovarasan) is the hero as the stories of the other three get condensed into the pre-interval portions. Krishna’s is the story that survives the rest of the film.

Cast: Poovarasan, Anupama Prakash, Yogi Babu, Powerstar Srinivasan
Director: Kesavan

The story is rather simple. Arivazhagan (Vicky Adhithyan), Sabari (Siva), and Ragavan (Vijay Karthick) are ‘soup boys’, who after becomig friends, decide to find and unite ‘true love’ couples. They meet Krishna, and on the next day, decide to on a road trip from Coimbatore to Madurai with Powerstar Srinivasan to reunite him with a girl. It is rather reminiscent of Samuthirakani's Nadodigal, but AAM treats this whole premise extremely lightly. Director Kesavan is happy to go for the easy laughs and faithfully sticks to this genre.

Each of the leads have a love story, a hummable song and a conflict. There is a constant undercurrent of humour that works in parts over the 135-minute runtime and allows other misgivings to be temporarily ignored — like how every conflict in this film is juvenile and whimsical. The best you can say about the actors is that they are all earnest. Among the four heroines with their extremely limited screen time, Sathya, who plays Sunitha (the love interest of Siva), tries her best to swim above the limitations of her character. And on the other end of the spectrum is Kavya (Anupama Prakash), the film's main lead, whose abysmal lipsyncing is distracting to say the least. 

The humour in this film works despite the presence of Powerstar and his facial contortions in the name of comedy. The toast of the season, Yogi Babu, is there for just a cameo, and he too, like the film itself, works only in parts. While David Showrrn's songs are certainly catchy, he fails to add too much spice with the background score and mainly relies on Ilaiyaraaja's old numbers to highlight various scenes.

Kesavan executes his intent to a certain degree, and it is clear that comedy is his forte. If not for the bad romance in this romcom, Avalukkenna Azhagiya Mugam may have been far better.