‘7 Naatkal’ has an ensemble cast starring Triggerstar Sakthivel, EggVeriyan Ganesh, KalyanJewels Prabhu and 2 other heroines whose names I don’t know and I don’t even want to google and find out. The director, who is a cousin of Triggerstar, claims that this film is a murder mystery. More like, the storyline, acting, performance and script writing were more mysterious than the actual intended murder mystery.
The film started with Prabhu, a filthy rich man announcing his 2nd son’s engagement to the daughter of India’s no 1 billionaire Ratnavel at an engagement hall filled with 100 over junior artistes. Prabhu cachinnated, “I am a businessman. Intha chance-ey viduvena? Payankitta koda ketkaama ok solliten. Vandhu payankita ketta, avan ennai vida periya businessman. Odane ok sollitaan.” Everyone clapped cheerfully. If I were part of the audience, I would have slapped myself for attending such engagement party.
The pampered and spoilt son with a group of rowdies visited a pub in the next scene. And there was a girl named Jennifer who came into the picture. He talked to her but she denied. Later, he got into trouble with one of his friends at the toilet pub because the friend was flirting with Jennifer. And I have no idea what was happening in this scene? Probably I didn’t follow the story for I am still slapping myself.
But I regained my consciousness when the most funniest shot of the movie was screened. As the pampered boy instructed the rowdies to drag the friend away, the camera panned to the right. There was someone in the toilet cubicle, with his pants down, listening to their conversation. (apparently later in the film, it was revealed that this was the investigator and he was none other than EggVeriyan Ganesh) I could laugh at this toilet shot for the next
7 naatkal.
Another story track was introduced where triggerstar sakthi played the role of a RJ working in Chennai BigFm. Despite the fact that he was working in Chennai, a planet nearest to the sun, he was mostly seen in shirt and jacket. His role was supposed to be this happy-go-lucky guy, moving on a hoverboard with Blackie, his pet dog.
The dog had a mind voice, that of V.S. Raghavan. Sadly, the mind-voice was more misogynistic than all dialogues uttered by Sivakarthikeyan and Simbu put together. Blackie made fun of other female dogs, degraded the heroine and blabbered many other nonsense in the name of humour.
The debutant director has littered the film with substantial amount of crap and myraid of unnecessary tight close-up shots, much tighter than how Snehan hugged Namitha when she left the Bigg Boss house. There was a scene where a group of policemen in the jeep chase Sakthi who was on his bicycle, but still unable to catch him.
There was another scene where the hero and heroine had to share a room. Like many Tamil cinema heroines, she too, was afraid of lightning and thunder- a must-characteristic of heroines so that it gives enough avenue for ‘jalapulajengz’ in the subsequent scene. Then, she crawled on to the bed and slept beside the hero. A loud thunder. Lightning. Heroine hugged the hero. It triggered him. Cut to a song on the world’s never-visited-before mountain.
When the fidgeting reaches a frustrating point, there was a heavy downpour of all kinds of murky plot debris involving prabhu getting upset with this son’s attitude, revelation of the fact that Ganesh the investigator was prabhu’s adopted son, both the sons hated each other, a politician was involved in a bribery case and Blackie misplaced a dvd containing god-knows-what-important-information.
The hero and heroine at one point, escaped from the rowdies. As they were walking on the street at night, two young chaps give a passing remark on the heroine -‘semma kattai’. Triggerstar got agitated with them, chase them away, removed his jacket and requested her to wear it. She denied it cos the jacket smells of body odour. Triggerstar saw a drunkard on the street. He gave it to him. She asked him why. He answered, “according to me, both of you all are the same.”
My IQ level was screaming and crying like a helpless cornered Bharani and almost wanted to do jump out of my system. The second half of this film featured most of what has come to be regarded as emblematic of every bad Tamil film -- character overload, unnecessary repetition of scenes and sequences, disjointed editing, jangling score, rehashed stunts and the most unsatisfying creative choice for the climax. Every part of film-making was so weak, weaker than Gayu’s calcium level.
Erroneously believing that the audience would lap anything up in the garb of a murder mystery isn’t just a filmmaking failure; it’s an abomination.
Not even a ‘maruthuvam mutham’ would save the audience from depression caused by watching this 135-minute film.
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