Sattendru Maarudhu Vaanilai Movie Review:
Brainrot is fine. Sometimes, you just want to throw back your head and let your mind zone out to thoughtless entertainment. It's fine if a film doesn't have a consistent tone, if it switches from an emotional scene to a stale comedy too often, and if its twists are written as if it were the director's whim on that day on set. Let us not pretend like we don't enjoy watching a poor watermelon lose his wife to a wealthy carrot and then go on to start a successful business and win her back. However, as ridiculous as it might sound, even brainrot content has its own standards. Even as a complete brainrot film, Sattendru Maarudhu Vaanilai fails to meet those standards. By the internal logic of the brainrot genre, it should be entertaining to watch the sheer randomness of Jai saving Meenakshi Govindarajan from acid attackers, to then getting punched by her boyfriend, to then asking her hand in marriage, to her welling up while saying the infamous line popularised by Bigg Boss Tamil, “Anbu ondru thaan anaadhai”, (What does it even mean?), all in a span of ten seconds, and only a day after they first meet. Unfortunately, Sattendru Maarudhu Vaanilai crosses the threshold of ‘entertaining brainrot’ and becomes ‘insufferable brainrot’.
Director: Babu Vijay
Cast: Jai, Meenakshi Govindarajan, Yogi Babu
Despite the botched execution, it is easy to recognise how the film has quite a number of interesting ideas. The central antagonist runs a network of hotels, which he uses to obtain intimate videos of couples, which he then sells on the dark web. Yogi Babu, who plays a typical comic relief colleague, still shows signs of darkness, which humanises him, but is just enough to stop him from turning cruel. However, there are several other half-baked ideas that go nowhere. An older politician who tries to marry Meenakshi Govindarajan’s character never comes up after the first few scenes. Jai’s backstory about the caretaker of an orphanage who helped him as a child never goes anywhere. Yogi Babu sells stolen laptops just so we get a convoluted meetup scene between the hero and the villain. Jai gets fired from his job because he went to a psychiatrist as a child. The heroine’s ex-boyfriend is relentlessly after her because he wants her inheritance, but he is also rich enough to cancel her loans and bribe the hero to sign the divorce papers. There are far too many desperate attempts to make sure the story makes sense, which ironically makes it all the more meaningless. Interestingly, the cinematography and music shows signs of competence that is a cut above the film’s writing.
Tamil cinema has always boasted young heroes who could play a boy-next-door and also pull off an emotionally intense performance; Jai has a prominent place in that list. Through films like Chennai 600028 (2007), Engaeyum Eppothum (2011), and Subramaniapuram (2008), Jai has left an indelible mark on the collective memory of the Tamil audience. Which is why it leaves us deeply disappointed to see him resort to blatant fanservice, not even of his own fans but of actor- Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Vijay’s huge fanbase. What could have been a charming nod to his affection for the actor-politician turns intolerable as you realise that he is trying to imitate Vijay in an unironical manner. Yogi Babu dulls the cringe by making jokes about it. But it is not quite enough. We get second hand embarrassment as Jai gets increasingly bold trying to reaffirm his “affection” for and “association” with Vijay. Someone needs to remind Jai that the Tamil audience likes him enough to not expect such desperate measures. Sattendru Maarudhu Vaanilai is what happens when a typical Tamil murder mystery screenplay gets affected by the ‘brainrot’ virus proliferated by short form content, and mutates into a two-hour-long chain of one bizarre decision after another.
