With Kamal Haasan comes ‘over’ expectations and when you find them ‘under’ fulfilled , the result is a movie called ‘Manmadhan Ambu’. When the cast and crew including the director go on a holiday to France, Italy and Venice on a cruise and back in India too they remain still on a holiday at Kodaikaanal, the movie just looks like all play and some work ‘here and there’. May be they didn’t take a few people along like ‘Crazy Mohan’ so the entire dialogues find no touch of craziness and makes you wonder if he did pen the dialogues for the movie. Only a very few repeat style of dialogues like when Kamal blabbers out something, then he says “did I say so?” and finds some different reasoning for the same dialogue could be one such example.

Else what can you say of the story which claims it’s a comic caper but fails miserably to evoke those emotions either inside the actors or inside the audience, barring very very few scenes. The story plot conceived may look fine but a few questions remain unanswered. Why Madhavan chose to date an actor for years, got engaged and suddenly woke up to suspect her? What on earth were they doing after their break-up of 3 years and why did he suddenly choose to follow her? Initially it appeared that Trisha went on a holiday after she broke-up for peace of mind and then we come to know the entire break-up – accident part took place 3 years back!! Again people like Usha Uthup who looked very much like the central plot of the story playing a villainous role suddenly seemed to vanish from the entire show.

The other funny question is ‘Why always kamal has to have a first wife who meets an early death and he encounters another girl later in life? This dates back to days of ‘Vettri vizha’ if you think of Vettayaadu Vilayadu recently!! There’s also some similarity in his attire of a loose-fitted sweat shirt (mainly orange or yellow) and a 6-pocket cargo like in PKS. All said and done it’s another Kamal movie and you can watch it and add to the list of Kamal movies you watched!

The verdict is ‘It’s a Kamal and K.S.Ravikumar holiday!’