Thanne Vandi Movie Review: Sex-starved characters lock horns in an entertainment-starved film 

Cutting the protagonist and the antagonist from the same cloth is a witty writing technique to make a screenplay engaging. We recently saw this in Minnal Murali, which had Shibhu and Jaison being put through very similar situations, but with opposing ideas and it worked wonders. Looking macroscopically Thanne Vandi aims for this but instead of giving the hero and villain the same powers, it gives them the same vice: perennial horniness. In case you are wondering if other characters in this world are any different, the answer is a disappointing no! Bala Saravanan, Thambi Ramaiah or every third character you spot on this screen has an uncontrollable urge to get laid. Make no mistake, the film doesn't embrace its image as an adult comedy, despite all this. It just tries to be everything starting from a musical dropping a song every fifteenth minute to a message film talking about abusive parenting, only to fall flat on its face. The lacklustre writing and shoddy craft just add to the misery. 

Cast: Umapathy Ramaiah, Bala Saravanan, Samskruthy, Vinutha Lal 

Director: Manika Vidya 
 

Thanne Vandi is an odd film that invokes reactions that are inverse to the scenes on screen. For instance, during a serious confrontation scene, Vinutha's character goes, "Enna touch panna mind pana maaten, aana en status ah touch pana summa vida maaten!" leaving the audience in splits, while the actual comedy scenes where the comedians, rhyme vasanthi with vaandhi, leave you depressed. There are also sequences that make you baffled about what to react to, like Umapathy's character losing his sense of hearing post a grievous accident and his friend unabashedly laughing at it.

Thanne Vandi was promised to be a tale of a man with drinking issues and also happens to own a water truck (hence the title). But the film ends up delivering a feel similar to a never-ending drunk talk of a distressing acquaintance, who assumes to be the star of the evening. The year 2021 was indeed challenging for a lot of us, but it didn't deserve this kind of a send-off from Tamil cinema.