M Muthiah has a good head for plot, but his screenwriting is like what you’d find in a TV serial. Still, the last hour made me sit up.
Spoilers ahead…
“A film by M Muthiah” carries the same cachet as, say, “a film by Quentin Tarantino”. The two directors may exist at the opposite ends of the artistry continuum, but you know exactly what you’re going to get. You know you are going to get a Komban, a Kutti Puli, a Marudhu: a crude mix of action and romance and comedy and sentiment. Pullikuthi Pandi, though, springs a small surprise. The film is not great. It’s not even good. But it’s not all bad. I actually liked the opening. The ruthless villain (Sannasi, played by Vela Ramamurthy) and his ruthless son (Saravedi, played by RK Suresh) are established in a ruthless stretch where a woman is decapitated. The son tells the father: “Periya Karuppu koil-la aada nee vettu, avala naan vettaren.” Blood flows in this film like milk on the cut-outs of big stars during FDFS shows.
Had this been the tone throughout, we’d have had a solid twist on the Thevar Magan thesis: that however much we try to resist violence, it is all around us and it will slowly pull us into its vicious circle and bathe us with bloodlust. But Pullikkuthi Pandi takes too long to get there, and we are left with a most generic film for about an hour and a half. The hero-intro is generic, with Pandi (Vikram Prabhu) singing “Venaam madhu pazhakkam” in a local drinking establishment. (The setting is Sivagangai.) The comedy is generic, with the hero’s uncle falling into a pile of dung and someone commenting, “Idhu dhaan nejamana sanitiser.” The screenwriting, such as it is, is generic, too: the hero-intro song is followed immediately by an action sequence, and the heroine-intro occurs soon after.
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Baradwaj Rangan 
brangan
January 20, 2021
What? No takers for a Muthiah movie? I’m shocked, I say. SHOCKED!
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hikicha
January 20, 2021
No takers for Sun Next 🙂
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H. Prasanna
January 20, 2021
Many interesting things going on at the plot level, BR, you’re right. Pretty consistent treatment of characters not found in other regular movies, say Bhoomi. For example, it is clear how the antagonist is able to maintain his empire. He never reacts quickly, face-to-face when confronted by angry, righteous characters. He holds it in, talks business, and unleashes his sons. His downfall begins when he is unable to hold it in anymore, with the incident between Pechi and Chittu.
Pechi’s stand about violence is also interesting. She is not against it, she just doesn’t want to be caught by the police, law. She has to look out for herself. Once she feels empowered after marrying Pandi, her simmering rage is unleashed, on Chittu, who is another interesting male-empowered woman.
Then, there is Pandi, who is actually a pacifist at heart since the start. See how he silently takes the beating from the cops at the station after the hero fight. He finds out who Pechi is before he sees her. How she takes care of the family without resorting to violence probably gives him hope. So, he is more than happy when she proposes he drop the violence. He has finally found a worthy cause for himself and moves on. But alas, the villains.
As you said since pretty much everything else is rote, all these things dissipate at the surface. But definitely an interesting watch.
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
January 20, 2021
I resorted to this film because I had an active SUNNXT subscription and I had missed advertisement-sandwiched “film watching” for close to a decade when we used to wait for the phrase “Indhiya Tholaikatchigalil mudhal murayaaga” during festivals. And I had never seen a Muthiah film before. Almost for three quarters of the film, it went along like a TV serial and boom, I didn’t expect the death that happened all of a sudden. It was a real shocker and the reason why this worked was because as an avid film watcher this is a scenario I have visualized multiple times, “What if this kind of thing happens in a masala movie?” “What if someone else takes the baton from there and do the unthinkable?” This feeling was similar to what I saw in the recent Malayalam film “Kappela”. That was also a scenario which I had contemplated right from my childhood though the similarities end there. I had always liked to think what if Prakash Raj had turned out to be the good guy who loves Trisha with all his heart and what if his emancipator Vijay turns out to be evil in Ghilli? Kappela gave me precisely that but it was nicely constructed and felt like a real movie.
But Pulikuthi as you said works mostly only on paper, the execution is very ordinary but I was glad someone had the guts to do what I had wanted to happen in a masala film all along. Another good thing was, that was not a twist that came out of nowhere, it very much belonged to the film and written into the character of Lakshmi Menon. And ever since she enters the movie, she dictates its course and her aversion to violence that culminates in the totally unexpected denouement is something that slightly elevated the film despite its obviously bad writing. Hats-off to Vikram Prabhu for agreeing to do this!
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Jaanaa Toom
January 20, 2021
Finally got around to watching this movie. Based on the trailer, I thought it would be a rehash of the director’s earlier outings. But I was surprised to see that despite the familiar beats, there are definitely some signs of consistent character motivations.
One thing that was interesting though, is that throughout the course of the film it is Pandi who changes for Pechi and not vice versa. And the change sticks. As a viewer, I was expecting Pandi to blast the baddies into the stratosphere during the second half of the movie – promises to non-violence be damned in the face of injustice.
Instead, after Pandi gives up violence for Pechi, at no point does he resort to using violence unless it is strictly to protect his wife. And even then, he resorts to pacifism almost immediately afterwards. Pandi is willing to let bygones be bygones if that keeps the peace between his family and the antagonists.
I can’t decide if I like the movie or not, but like BR said, it has an oddly compelling second half that is definitely worth tuning in for.
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H. Prasanna
January 20, 2021
@BR Something about that ickiness didn’t stick and that worked for me. The desired disgust at the villain’s relationships did not register because technically everything was bland. This bland quality enabled a sort-of pseudo-objective look at the villain’s, especially Chittu’s, activities. Maybe because of that, for me, it was more like hero ideology versus villain ideology rather than good versus evil. It was a good ground to be on, even if it was unintentional, I felt.
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