Sunday 23 August 2015

Vijay: A Good or Horrible Actor?

When the name Vijay is said, you will hear a grand roar of cheers and applause across India. He is seen like a demigod by the people across India. In fact he has the second largest fan base in the Kollywood industry, just only behind the God himself Rajinikanth. Yes Vijay does have a bigger fan base than the legendary Kamal Hassan.

But if you were to take a moment to step outside of India, this is what you would see
He has became the biggest face of troll face and joke among people. People outside India just seem to hate him. So how can actor, who is worshiped at one place, becomes the face of dislike for many in another place.

Well there is only one person responsible for that and it is Vijay himself. Up to Ghilli in 2004, Vijay has been looking very promising. He looks like a young upcoming hero who is ready to move up the next stage. At times an actor has two choices in their career path, which is to do character based films or commercial entertainer.

Vijay played his cards to his strengths and went on doing commercial entertainers. At first it looked for him with films from Ghilli to Sivakasi but it when you do similar kind of movies over and over again, the audience loses patience. Because the taste of India audience is very much different to foreign audience. 

From here on his career took a downwards spiral. From 2004 to 2010, Vijay did  12 movies and only handful was watchable while the rest were disastrous. A career low Sura just summed up how is career was moving at that time. The movie was so bad, I would actually suggested to our government to screen the movie to criminals as a punishment. That's 2 hours of mental torture.

But from here you could see a change in direction from Vijay. He clearly learned to pick his script better and more importantly, working with successful establish directors. The comeback started with Kavaalan. A malayalam remake movie which he shed out all his commercial elements and did a character role. It was like seeing the yesteryear of Vijay once again. That movie showed that, there is still a quality actor in him which needed the write guidance

From Kavaalan onwards I would say all his films has been  excellent. He kept doing commercial entertainers but the difference was it was based on a more stronger gripper script with proper directors.
7 movies since Sura and they have been good watch. Perhaps the only not excellent film was Jilla, but you want to enjoy the screen presence of Vijay-Mohanlal than it is a treat.

Again it was not over the top, having to dig deep in kinda performance movie. No that is not what Vijay does. Simple commercial entertainers. That is what he is good at and he now has found the magic ingredient to make it work. Thuppaki will be for me his best ever movie and with that the comeback was complete

Yet I've noticed that despite in a change of direction, people out of India still can't accept that he has been good. It's the same people who said that Singam 2 was superb and Kathi was poor. I'm not saying Kathi is a masterpiece, but if Vijay were to have acted in Singam/ Singam 2, you would see the among of hatred. (P/S: Singam is terrible). I guess the problem is not Vijay or the type of movies he does, it's the people. They have placed a mental block in front of them which says "No matter movie Vijay does, it is useless".

 With that kind of thought in mind, there is nothing more Vijay can do to win over these fans. In fact this is what you call hatters. People who will hate you no matter what you would do. With the Puli trailer out, I've seen how the hatters are going on and on about it, but it doesn't concern me a bit. To me the film looks like a promising commercial entertainer which will be work on Vijay strength. If the film has a strong villain, than the movie will do well.

Things are looking good for him with Puli and an upcoming movie with Atlee and I wish him all the very best. I would love to see him continue this successful streak from 2011. I can't think of any other actor how has enjoyed so much success continuously for 4 years, so once again congrats to Vijay for making that change in his career.

Looking forward to Puli!!!

1 comment:

  1. I think this is the correct platform for me to express my detestation towards Vijay! You may wonder if I say that he is the only actor I dislike the most... And I would say the main factor is his fans! Too much of hype they give without realizing that he is just an actor! We supposed to get entertained by him.. Aana nambe tamil makkals vitta kovil katti poojai pannuvangge pole! grin emoticon (1) Sometimes when it is so obvious that the movie is a piece of shit, they still blindly say it's nice! because they are being so called loyal fans! (2) They have a special boundary something like race and religion.. They don't prefer to praise better actors because they are being a loyal fan.. (3) They tend to like whatever he likes.. Nanti he like najib pun sure his loyal fans might sokong najib! (4) They do not value anything else in a movie! Come on people are putting effort to write song, bina set yang grand2, compose music yang susah2, singer pula thonde kiliye kiliye paaderaaning, director susah payah try to put up a good display on the screen, but they just dont care about anything else.. grin emoticon "Eh semmeh song macha ithe kelu! What a lyrics! What a composition!".. "Atha macha thalabathy song, videh keppom!".. So ungge thalabathy dance aderethe neengge radio le koode paakkeringge?? Kodume daa! Im not saying all Vijay fans are like this.. But whoever surrounds me memang like this.. and they AGREE that they memang like that and can't do anything because they are crazily being his die hard fans! End of the day what I understood is different people, different preference and I do respect them.. I simply kutuk Vijay in front of his fans just to make fun only.. Otherwise i respect his talent too.. like emoticon

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