‘Vaathi’ movie review: Dhanush can’t save this middle education drama which kills its potential

A scene from ‘Vaathi’

Minutes in Venky Atluri’s Vaathi (Or Sir In Telugu), you see a pattern whose shadow moves throughout the film. Venky begins the story in a nonchalant, serious manner. In 2022, three boys find a box of video cassettes. They play the video and we see the back of a teacher writing some trigonometry sums on a blackboard. It’s Dhanush (of course) and he also turns to the camera for half a second. The iconic public introduction shot goes awry. Does half a second matter? The mystery of the cassette leads the boys to a district collector’s office, and Venky once again shows Dhanush looking straight at us from a picture on the wall.

If the introduction is so serious and intriguing, even the casual use of Venky’s songs in the first half carries this subdued energy, and the prospect of an entire film in the same mold is exciting. The best dancer in Dhanush takes a step back when there is no set-up for the first song; He walks down a street and without noticing it casually shuffles his feet. and in between or speaker, A romantic track, Venky narrates something heavy, how a school becomes a temple for marginalized communities who are not allowed inside temples. These are great ideas.

But this is only half of the pattern; unfortunately, Vaathi is full of one-off characters that quickly find their evil twin. That is, the film keeps reducing itself by unnecessarily adding things.

The setting of the film is in the 90s in a town called Sozhavaram on the Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh border. Dhanush’s character Balamurugan, an assistant teacher at a private school called Thirupathi Coaching Centre, is sent as a full-time maths teacher to a government school in Sozhavaram due to the government’s settlement with TCC chief Srinivasa Tirupati (Samuthirakani). However, Tirupati has its own agenda; Sending these “class III” teachers to government schools is to ensure that their own students come out on top.

But Balamurugan naturally has a noble mission in mind, ensuring the students attend classes, then brings them together, and gangs up against Tirupati. Now, the geographical and period settings definitely help – the lack of communication devices, modern modes of transport and the internet are essential to tell this story – and setting it in a border town helps this Tamil-Telugu bilingual film. meets. However, the film soon stops establishing the look and feel of the time, and scenes have terrible lip-syncs.

Vaathi is a film in which the protagonist finds small ways to win big, but the dull screenplay provides little payoff even when the moments are set up well. Similarly, the screenplay needs more scenes such as Bala explaining the futility of caste and the class becoming a miniature of society; Any more than that, and we could get something similar to the 2007 American film freedom Writers,

The film is also full of one-off characters who showed potential early on. The characters played by Tanikella Bharani and Harish Peradi have no importance in the story. While Ken Karunas’s Muthu finds himself in some interesting areas in the screenplay, Samyuktha’s Meenakshi is deadweight. Coming to the star at the center of all this, you only feel bad for Dhanush as he single-handedly tries to support even in the middle parts of the film. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough on paper to help him.

At one point, director Venky goes meta to say that even a cinema theater can impart education when needed, and his noble message is loud and clear in the film. You only wish the script was as sharp as the tip of Dhanush’s fountain pen and bent like his half-arms.

Vaathi (or SIR) is currently running in theaters