Anandham Vilayadum Veedu movie review: This family drama, starring Gautham Karthik and Cheran, is a lukewarm fare

1.5/5

Story: Two half brothers decide to build a big house in their village with the intention of staying together with all the other family members. However, differences in opinion occurs when a few relatives express their disinterest owing to a few reasons. Sensing the lack of unity in the big family, a shrewd businessman who holds grudge against a few of its family members, decides to create rift among them. Will the brothers be able to unite all the family members and realize their dream?

Review: Kollywood seems to have really obsessed with family dramas in the last few years after a few of them minted gold at the box office. But a slew of movies which belong to the genre in the recent past has been testing the patience of viewers, thanks to repetitive sequences, lack of novelty and excessive melodrama.

Nandha Periyasamy's Anandham Vilayadum Veedu is the latest to join the bandwagon because of the desperate need to tick all the boxes in a so-called commercial family drama.  

Muthupandi (Cheran) and Kasiappan (Saravanan) are half-brothers who share mutual respect for each other. Both of them have three other brothers each and they all share a cordial relationship with one another. The brothers decide to build a big house so as to accommodate everyone together.

They also start searching various sources for earning money for the same. Meanwhile, Karuppan (Daniel Balaji), a shrewd businessman, who is jealous of the financial growth of Muthupandi who happens to be his former employee, sets out to create troubles for him. He emotionally manipulates the two brothers of Muthupandi and makes them go against the latter.

Muthupandi, who gets hospitalized after an injury, returns back only to see that the house construction has gone haywire. He learns about Karuppan's plans to create dispute among the family members and asks his brothers to stay away from him. He also questions Kasiappan about the delay in building the house and hands over the responsibility to Kasi's son Sakthi (Gautham Karthik). 

After a while, Sakthi and Karuppan lock horns over the issue, and the latter gets a court injunction against the house construction. Can the brothers reunite the family and realize their dream of living happily together with all the family members?

The plot which is as old as the hills is further crumbled with poor execution. A handful of sequences involving Cheran's emotional performance works; the actor-filmmaker has invested his soul to the character. But a spate of characters which are underwritten fail to complement his performance and sincerity.

The number of family members in the story are too much that we fail to recognize who is related to whom till the end of the film. Saravanan's character as the elder brother is decently written, but not once we get an effective performance from him, which leads to viewers becoming disinterest in the honest relationship between brothers.      

The actual story has Cheran's Muthupandi as its protagonist, but Gautham Karthik is presented as the 'hero' of the movie as he gets to fight with the antagonist and beats a few baddies black and blue at regular intervals. He also shakes a leg with a female lead (Shivathmika Rajasekhar) whose character is grossly underwritten, to say the least.

The proceedings especially after the plot gets thicker, involving family disputes, remind us of several Tamil films which released over the decades. The lack of new conflicts, novel characters, predictable sequences and tailor-made antagonist make it difficult to sit through the movie.   

With a title like Anandham Vilayadum Veedu and a slew of characters in the poster, we get a fair idea of what the film's story is going to be. But seldom do we come across films where we could predict every subsequent sequence in them. 

This patience-testing family drama is one such attempt. The technical aspects, too, are okayish and do not help the film rise above its foreseeability.    

Verdict: This emotional family drama with numerous characters and unengaging screenplay offers nothing new.

Anandham Vilayadum Veedu is streaming on Zee5.