தசாவதாரம் - திரை விமர்சனம்

Good start, surprise, interesting, laugh, dragging, finally over. This is the sequence of emotions I got when I watched Dasavatharam. The movie starts with a 12th Century episode which was a good start. The plot around bio-terrorism was a huge surprise for a tamil movie and the events that unfolds right after that was interesting. The whole Naidu episode and parts of Govind & Andal ride was laughable. The sequence and the characters in the later half of the movie to cover 10 avatars was a bit dragging. After several doses of Kamal's personal agenda, when the end comes in this 3 hour plus movie, you get a sigh of relief, it's finally over.

I think the whole movie was made with just one goal in mind - பத்து அவதாரம். Kamal was brilliant as Naidu and Rangarajan. Fletcher and Krishnaveni are good attempts. President Bush was technically correct, but for some reason, the character invokes a lots of laugh and not enough seriousness. Young Govinda looks old and there was nothing special about Avtar Singh. Japanese & other characters are just fillers to make up the numbers.

Asin has quite a bit of scope for acting and comedy, but there's nothing new in her acting (Madhan once said "Asin is like அளவு சாப்பாடு", how true?). Mallika Sherawat (she is gorgeous), Jayapradha, Raghuram, P Vasu, Nagesh, KR Vijaya and bunch of other Kamal movie regulars like Santhana Bharathi, Vayyapuri, Ramesh Khanna etc forms the rest of the cast.

The screenplay could have been stronger for this 'one line story' movie. I personally believe that both Kamal and KB miss Ananthu when it comes to fine tuning screenplay. Kamal has shown great improvement since Mumbai Express (which I thought was a disaster) in the comedy portions of the dialogues. CGI was cheesy for the most part and could have been much better, and the songs in this movie was a huge letdown.

Kamal has tried to dish out this scientific thriller with a good mix of religion and comedy. He also gets enormous help from K S Ravikumar's direction and his usual commerical success formula. The end result is a good masala movie.