In this lame attempt to belatedly pat oneself on the back for standing up to the toxic fumes of male aggression and transgression, the dependable Shine Tom Chacko, well, shines in the title role. Shine, a gifted actor even in uneasy circumstances (this being one of them), plays what was once known as a womanizer. This film updates the malaise, though no one really calls Vivekanand a sex addict, his victims acknowledge him as a “weirdo” and “sadist”.
In what could have been the most delectable revenge on a male predator since Colin Higgins’ 1980 sex comedy 9 to 5, there isn’t much sex in Vivekanandan Viralanu, although a lot of pssst-pssst talk about it. The women whom Vivekanand targets by ogling, trapping, and manipulating come together to take him hostage, tie him to a chair in his father’s home, and torture him, a la Vijay Varma in Darlings, which was funnier, sharper and more focussed in making the predator eat humble pie.
Vivekanand Viralanu seems to amble along listlessly most of the time, prodding itself awake intermittently to serve up loud sermons on consent. It is all very pointedly self-righteous. Writer-director Kamal seems to have planned a film on female empowerment. His anti-hero, a slimy, lustful, sleazy character if ever there was one, is only a pretext for Kamal’s loud cinematic version of pamphleteering.
At times, the storytelling gets so clunky and overcooked that it feels like a free-for-all. The video journalist Aisha (Mareena) locking herself in with Vivekanand and his aggrieved female associates, with cops jostling outside, is the kind of purposely unfocused mob-centric satire that South Indian cinema frequently visits, with mixed results.
Such message-oriented melee could be mildly amusing if handled with care. This is not one of those films. Vivekanandan Viralanu begins on a wobbly note and never gets back on its feet. There is a subplot about Vivekanand’s estranged parents. The oafish way the misunderstanding between them is cleared up plays up the narrative’s crippling shortcomings.
The potentially arresting statement on the leery male gaze is swept under mounds of nuisance where the characters try to show themselves as concerned citizens. They actually seem like those finger-wagging customers at the bank who lecture the tellers on the crispness, or lack of it, of the currency.
Sure, the currency is a sound bait. But a film has to compound it with tact, a quality sorely missing here. While Shine Tom Chacko is suitably cheesy, Grace Anthony, as his dangerously reluctant mistress, seems to be the only woman who doesn’t feel like she is in a sponsored commercial on misogyny.
