Every actor worth his salt seems determined to play a dada or a rowdy working for such a dada in atleast one movie.
Sena finds Satyaraj donning the role of the loyal rowdy who finds his loyalties split between his boss and his
friends. Repetitive proceedings and an extremely high body count result in rather tough viewing. Sena is not
likely to occupy a high perch in the list of rowdies we have seen in Tamil cinema recently.
Sena(Satyaraj) took to rowdyism as a young boy in order to feed his brother Vikram. Mastan Bhai(Anandraj) took Sena under his
wing and helped him send his brother abroad for higher studies. For this Sena is always indebted to Mastan Bhai. Sena is close
to Satya, an honest policeman, and when Satya steps on Mastan Bhai's toes once too often, Bhai has him killed. But this angers
Vikram, who vows to bring Satya's killers and Mastan Bhai himself to book.
Satyaraj's first fight with the rowdies has some nice quips that lead us to think that the character would turn out to be one
his more memorable ones. But the cleverness doesn't last long. It becomes clear within a few reels that Satyaraj is just
another rowdy with not many characteristics to make him stand out from the other similar rowdies in recent Tamil movies.
Things soon become monotonous as his friends and family urge him to leave his life of violence while he swears his loyalty
to Anandraj.
The movie illustrates the dangerous life of rowdies well with their constantly shifting loyalties and mistrust of everyone
around them. And it doesn't limit such double crossing to the villains. Even Satyaraj plays such games as evident from
his pact with Chandrasekhar. These sequences show some thinking on the part of the director with the set up of the second
killer being especially clever.
The caption at the end of the movie makes us realise that Sena was supposed to be a lesson on the futility of violence.
While the lack of sermonizing is welcome, the path of extreme violence the movie has chosen is as much a turn off as long dialogs
would have been. The movie turns into a bloodbath as the end nears with several needless deaths. Unfortunately, the deaths seem
exploitative and don't earn our sympathy.
Satyaraj gets the chance to deliver several dialogs in his usual style and spares us any romancing since he is not paired with
any heroine. The romancing is left to Aravind and Raksha who seem to be engaged in a competition on who is the more
wooden-faced among the two (Aravind wins it quite handsomely!). Anandraj makes a nice dada but Chandrasekhar is unimpressive.
A stronger actor in his role would have helped.
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