Yaaradi Nee Mohini - Movie Review

YNM is the Indian Bruce Lee’s big release for this summer (In case you were wondering that’s how Dhanush is affectionately called by his 100 crore fans). Directed by his brother Selva in Telegu, his dutiful assistant Jawahar is credited for the Tamil version. It is Dhanush’s favorite role of a useless, good-for-nothing bloke, who can’t find a decent job, until a woman (or a motorbike) way over his league crosses his way, and he seems to revel in it. Nayantara plays Keerthi aka Neetu aka Komalavalli (just as appropriate as Rukumani was for Simran!), the girl way over his league.

Dhanush gallivants around town in search of a job that seems elusive until he sees his damsel. He does what any man, or at least any man whose brother is writing the script, would do – Chases the damsel down and finds a job in the same company. Obviously the ‘impress the princess’ phase follows. Dhanush is barely a few days into his job when Nayan, his manager, commits the blunder of putting a trainee on a project with a critical deliverable the following day. The project is a one of a kind project that requires 300 software engineers to work on DOS-based i286 machines to render the words ‘SYSTEM ACTIVATED’ on the screen. Our hero, seeing his damsel in distress, works through the night, writes 3000 lines of code in Visual C++, goes through several debugging cycles, and makes the magic words appear on the screen, leaving only one question in the mind of the audience – How could such a software genius have not found a job for 5 years?. Of course, Nayan is duly impressed. The hero then expresses his love in Australia, which the heroine readily rejects citing that she is due to get married the following month. She also insults his father, played by Raghuvaran, who dies the following day.

Dhanush’s friends, played by Karthik (of ‘Kandal Naal Mudhal’) and Karunas, suggest that he spend the month until Karthik’s marriage with Karthik’s family in the village. No points for guessing who Karthik is getting married to. Of course Karthik doesn’t know this until the final act. The director then shows his abject ignorance, extravagant generalization skills, and his fascination for butts and farts, to depict a prototype Iyengar family. The part of the screenplay leading up to the climax revolves around our hero impressing Karthik and Nayan’s family, and making Nayan realize his worth. I should say the climax was a fairly nice touch.

The movie works in parts. Dhanush fits the role and carries the movie efficiently on his thin frame. Nayan, while sometimes over the top, emotes rather well. Raghuvaran’s cameo as Dhanush’s father sure feels like an appropriate requiem for himself. The other caricatures and clowns fit the bill. The mostly lively screenplay masks the thin plot. On the downside, most of the songs are boring as is the background score. Someone needs to tell Yuvan that there is more to a background score than a Yamaha PSR 500. While the cliché’s on coincidences and license to assume a software company that give’s a month off may be excused, some cliché’s, like the man servant of the house asking the skin and bones hero how to build muscles like him, the hero replying in the negative to the heroine’s question on whether he would ever get married, and the ridiculous depiction of the heroine’s family, could have easily been avoided. With that said, Jawahar conjures up a fairly interesting movie with his master’s story and screenplay as a reference.

Bottomline: Worth a watch in spite of some cringe worthy scenes.