Official Movie Trailer:

Mookthi Amman from RJ Balaji starts well, first 30-40mts of the movie worked effectively to setup the premise. We get introduced to Engels Ramasamy (get the drift?) and his family, mother, 3 sisters, and grandfather. Family struggles to make their ends meet and life hasn’t been good to them. Sample these: father has run away, gap between Engels and his last sister is 16 years, education stopped for first sister so that she can take care of home. Premise worked for me and I kept wondering how the director is going to weave in Amman entry and take the story forward. How the Amman makes the family realize their potential would have been a good story too still giving the core message, one can directly converse with god and don’t need messengers in between. In that story director could have developed the conflict of goddess vs god – Mookuthi Amman at one time wonders (jealousy?) why Thirupathi gets all the attention while her temple is not. But RJ Balaji and NJ Saravanan aims big and nothing wrong with it per se. Except it would have helped if they have developed the villain character much more powerfully to get the message across. Godmen villain comes across as a caricature with zero intelligence. With one question he gets bowled over. Rather than folding the messages in to scenes and staging it, director resorts to PSA. No fresh scenes, we have seen them umpteen times in Shankar and Shankar type movies. There are few scenes which are staged well, some good piece of writing there, Engels bringing himself to appreciate his sister, Urvashi explaining the reason behind staying with abusive husband, milk from paambu putru event used in climax scene. Like I mentioned earlier, more space could have been given to Mookuthi Amman’s jealousy with Thirupathi god getting all the attention, why the father left the family (how he got lured in to godmen ashram), prelude scenes about how gems and stones get pushed to believers (Sathuranga Vettai did an excellent job on this) to lead to the guarantee scene.

BTW, movie isn’t bad either. It is a more of a could have been movie let down by lazy writing, tonal shifts distract the viewer. Urvashi does an impressive job as mother with her effortless acting, her delivery worked every time. Nayanthara, is magnificent, more screen space to Amman would have helped.

Amman movies had a successful run for a decade or so and died out around late 90’s. RJ Balaji has resurrected it. We will have to continue to wait to see a Tamil movie that discusses our relationship with god and religion in a serious way still keeping it mainstream without resorting to Shankar’s tropes, and PSA.