Adhibar

An NRI comes to Chennai and starts a real estate business. Even as his venture picks up, he learns that he is being cheated by a person he trusts the most and is jailed for fraud. How does he get out the web of deceit?

Adhibar is an exercise in mediocrity that seems to be intended mainly as a feature-length branding exercise for its producer T Sivakumar. He is credited for the story of the film. He also plays a character who helps the hero and is introduced with a lot of build-up (the feet-first introduction reserved for a mass hero). And to top all this, there is a very blatant in-film advertisement for the producer's business venture. We are told that the story is based on a real-life incident that happened in Sri Lanka, but there is so much randomness in the movie that we start wondering if real life can be this random. Characters behave in the most implausible manner and take instant decisions that no sane person in real life might take. We first see the hero, Shiva (Jeevan, who seems so uninvolved), in Canada, but he decides to come to India just because his mother tells him not to get into altercations there. He decides to start a real-estate firm here. He just starts to trust a lawyer, Eswaran (Ranjith, with a fake beard that is phonier than his character), who, he is told, is a noble man. He never even thinks twice when this lawyer is shown consorting with girls half his age with a drink in hand and has a brother who is a rowdy (Richard). Perhaps, he has never seen any Tamil film. An even more ridiculous moment happens when he immediately accepts a gangster (Nandaa, in a thankless role) as his friend just because the guy tells him he has reformed! Naturally, he is cheated and is sent to prison for connections with The Iyakkam (the film's way of referring to the LTTE) and it is only thanks to two people that he gets his life back on road — a straightforward CBI officer (T Sivakumar) and his prison inmate (the normally dependent Samuthirakani who seems to have been included just so his face might attract an unwitting person into the theatre). And there are supporting characters — the heroine, Suganthi (Vidhya), who is even more gullible than Shiva, her dad (Singamuthu), who believes a constable to be a high-ranking CBI officer, Shiva's uncle (the almost omnipresent Thambi Ramaiah) whose son calls him 'vada, poda' and breaks into a lecture on how parents should treat kids. There is also Kovai Sarala somewhere in this mix, as Shiva's employee who tries to cheat Suganthi. The only thing that these characters actually do is bore us to death with their irritating attempts at comedy. By the time the film ends, we feel we have woken up from a nightmare that never seemed to end.