Endhiran - Just Pass

Yesterday in an article in the times of India, there was a phrase that caught my eye ''the phenomenon that is Rajini'' - I realized how true it was when we went to the theatre at 10:30 pm and saw it swarming with all Indians and Srilankans in Munich and I thought to myself that if one wanted to meet the community and make new friends, there can be no better venue !

Since someone came up with a brilliant idea of allotting tickets WITHOUT seat numbers, there was quite a bit of drama (pushing, yelling, swearing, scramming to find the best seats) before everyone settled down to watch the movie. Just when I was thinking that this is starting to feel a lot like the FDFS in India, people started whistling and throwing paper flowers when Rajini's name was screened (just the name not the man) and obviously when Rajini first appeared, I almost went deaf from the whistling !

After that ''Thaliavar'' intro, let me come back to the movie (spoiler alert).

The +++++++

- The ''desi'' touches with the robot (his Rajini walk, his changing hairstyles) and over all the intial introduction of him to the world is very enjoyable

- The climax where the swarm learns from one another and takes all kinds of shapes (Remember the swarm of nanorobots from Micheal Crichton's Prey ? There is probably a slight chance that Shankar will get sued for this)

- Mosquito scene

- The bad robot (reminded me of those villain roles that Rajini had so successfully done in the past)

The -------------

- The top most for me is that this is not a Rajini movie, I mean, anyone else could have played this role. I mean when I saw Mottai Shivaji I thought to myself "Man, no one else can pull that off with so much style'' and there was no such moment during Endhiran.

- Santhanam and Karunas' comedy track: Even if we condescend to accept them both as robotic research assistants, what kind of them smoke and drink sarayam in the lab and goad the robot that he cant drink or smoke ??!

- Too many songs, especially inserted in all the wrong places. I could have made my peace with them had I liked the songs in the first place. They were too techno and Aishwarya wearing costumes that she couldn't pull off did not help (My heart broke when I saw flab), inspite of the exotic locations.

- Too many cliched and ergo, unwanted scenes (why should even hero robots fight bad guys wanting to molest the heroine), the movie could have been 30 min shorter !

And what's the deal with Ash quietly watching when Bad robot Rajini is on a killing spree !? She can ask him not to harm Rajini but she cant do that for other innocent people ?! Oh..well...one should not really ask logical questions when watching thalaivar padam but I couldn't help wonder about this.

One thing is for sure, its very clear why Rajini is in the movie because with no one else can they make back the 200 crores (or more) invested in this movie with this story/screenplay.

Verdict: Watchable, but just once (and if everyone does that, they get their money back and more at these ticket prices !)

PS: It was hilarious when there were a couple of German dialogues in the movie and the audience shouted saying ''We dont need subtitles'' :D !