Kanithan Review

The talented Atharvaa Murali who has till now appeared in mostly soft romantic roles has taken on a full fledged urban action hero's avatar and meets instant success with his lively performance and agility in the action sequences.  Can the same be said about the film as a whole is an entirely different matter altogether.

Atharvaa plays a young happy go lucky news reporter for a modest TV channel whose only ambition is to become a BBC reporter falls in love at first sight with Catherine Tresa who he meets in a bar and later finds out that she is actually his boss Manobala’s daughter (???).  Just when the hero gets selected by BBC his life turns upside down when he along with four other  unconnected  young men get arrested by the police who allege that the five of them have procured loans to the tune of 13 crores from a private bank providing fake certificates and documents.  Out on bail, he single handedly weaves a net and traps the fake certificate mafia run by a Burmese gangster while the police force disappear conveniently.
 
Atharvaa is a perfect fit for the role of the angry young man who uses his brains and brawn in equal measure and he has the right expressions for all the emotions, making him a cute little package who the girls would root for throughout.  Catherine Tresa as the heroine looks fetching,  but has little to do other than hang around the hero and dance for the two songs.  Tarun Arora as the Burmese gangster who masterminds the fake educational certificate mafia is menacing.  Veteran K.Bhagyaraj, Karunakaran and Sundar Ramu do justice to their roles as the allies of the hero.
 
Arvind Krishna's cinematography is the biggest plus for the film while editor Bhuvan Srinivasan could have put the scissors to use in many scenes that seem never ending.  Drums Sivamani in his second outing as music director has given some peppy numbers and the BGM by a newcomer is good with the drums dominating .  Full marks to the fight choreographer who has done a great job with all the fights especially the one in which the villains ordinary looking son suddenly transforms into a lethal dynamo using his fists and legs to get Atharvaa in a tangle who matches him fist for fist and leg for leg.

Writer-director T.N. Santhosh has ambitions of exposing the fake educations certificate racket that is very much prevalent in the country,  but while transferring the story onto celluloid has missed the mark here and there. Having said that Santhosh has put in a lot of efforts to authentically show how a fake certificate is produced and all the related scenes are interesting. The heavily clichéd opening scenes establishing the hero and the following love scenes between Catherine and Atharvaa are rank boring and the director loses the audiences there itself,  though they are jolted back into the story when the hero is arrested on such a serious charge.  The film sustains interest for a while after that, but the 80s styled functioning of the hero, that too an accused out on bail  gets wherever he wants and even has the police doing his bidding defies logic ,hampering  the screenplay and  it struggles to recover.  The director conveniently forgets to deal with what happened to the bank loan issue which seemed to be the main plot point.
 
Verdict : Watch ‘Kanithan’ for Atharvaa Murali and the well choreographed action sequences.