India Pakistan (2015)

India Pakistan is the kind of film that you might not feel compelled to watch, but if you do catch it, you might not mind it. It is unremarkable in every way with its share of problems but still manages to be a mildly diverting entertainer. The reason for this is that the director N Anand keeps things at a spoof level where another director might have gone for melodrama or action, for which the story offers plenty of scope.

First there is the romance between Karthick (Vijay Antony) and Mellina (Sushma Raj) who have fallen in love at first sight not realizing that soon enough they will be turning into rivals. A Vannakam Chennai-ish mix-up results in the two agreeing to share an office space only to realize later that they are both lawyers. They strike a deal that whoever gets a case first will stay in the place while the other will move out. And thus begins their squabbles and the two try to run down one another in the race to get a client. And as luck would have it, they both land the same case: a childish land dispute between equally juvenile village big shots — Kaattamuthu (Pasupathy) and Marudhamuthu (MS Bhaskar). Meanwhile, a parallel track, that is straight out of Nadigan, involves one of the leads unwittingly being in possession of a DVD that is an evidence for an illegal encounter and Sampath ( Sharath Lohitashwa), the cop behind the murder, is after them.

If India Pakistan works, it is mainly due to Pasupathy and MS Bhaskar who are in top form and keep the laughs coming with their antics. In a different movie, Pasupathy's Kaattamuthu would have been a fearsome person but here, even when he commits murder, the film portrays him in a comical manner. It also helps that the actor, who can at times be stiff, has loosened up his body language to play this role. And MS Bhaskar, as the superstitious Marudhamuthu, proves to be an apt comic foil and watching him speak his lines in the Thirunelveli slang is a delightful experience. The climax, when the two, along with their cohorts (which includes a bevy of minor comic actors), team up with Karthick and try to rescue the heroine from Sampath is just a madcap sequence that has us laughing despite the silliness of the scene.

However, to get to this point, we are forced to spend the entire first half watching the cat-and-mouse fight between Karthick and Mellina. Vijay Antony (whose expressions continue to be placid) and Sushma Raj (who, surprisingly for a Tamil film heroine, gets her lip-sync right), unlike Shiva and Priya Anand in Vanakkam Chennai, aren't actors who can handle comedy that well, and so, after the first couple of scenes, things turn redundant. The narrative even takes an overlong digression and moves to the village of Kaattamuthu and Marudhamuthu. A couple of songs also add to our frustration. It is only when the action shifts to the city, that we heave a sigh of relief.