`Evariki Thalavanchadu': Love, sex aur badla

ET is the Telugu dub of EtharkkumThunindhavan and has no surprises along the feature-length with all the tried, tested and worn-down concepts of a savior going all out against a menacing maleficent villain.Krishna Mohan (Suriya) is a lawyer in one of the culturally symbiotic duo of villages where eventually the dominoes collapse to give rise to enmity between the scions of the villages. He has a supportive mother and pseudo strict father played by Sathyaraj. Sathyaraj seems to be stuck in the casting stereotype of a fatherly rural scion in almost all the major commercial movies in the recent decade.

The mode of progression chosen at least in the first half is a poorly drawn Star Wars kind of auditory narrative with almost the nuances of the rural dynamics. The backdrop of the premise is blurted out in one mundane monologue. What follows is a romantic arc between Krishna Mohan and Adhira (Priyanka), a typical desi belle who instantaneously falls in love with the protagonist. Save for the energetic score and performance of Suriya, who tries to draw this chariot by his charm, the first half is painfully pointless. One of the major reasons for the disconnect experienced is the haphazard pace of events where no concrete reliability is offered with any of the characters, neither central nor peripheral.

With a sluggish first half focused entirely on driving the point to Krishna's marriage, the underlying plot of an ominous misogynist villain is thrown in the face with patched chunks of the story. Vinay Rai as Kamesh is heavily cramped into a unilateral evil character, who reminds of typical 90's villains in neon lights, only aided with a story element of modern technology. While trying to take on a similar note as a mysterious villain from Thupparivaalan (Detective in Telugu), he falls short into a plane of banality that is constructed on the axes of misogyny and womanizing. The crude blankness for a basis for the antagonist's character makes it even harder to consume the storyline onto an empathetic platform.

While the story catches onto significant progress in the second half, the social message is unraveled by knitting the stories of women blackmailed with pornographic material involving them. This forms the sole appreciative element of the storytelling experience which reverberates on the idea of victim shaming in society and how the focus of a womanizing narrative should address the aggressor and the measures related to them rather than the victims. But this does not go without a sub-text of a contradictory conciliation, where Krishna's mother talks about his son's character when Adhira fakes pregnancy by premarital sex. While the movie talks about women's assertiveness, it also criticizes the idea of premarital sex.

And the climax, which is supposed to serve as the closed-loop of revenge for all the women exploited and wronged by the antagonist, hits above its weight by encouraging the idea of killing the miscreants despite the protagonist being a lawyer.

ET is a family drama oriented at the masses with a supposed social message but does not cut out problems that can counteract the intentions of the message served.