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'Madha Gaja Raja' Movie Review: Sundar C Serves Up An Amusing Cocktail Of Silly And Sleaze
Sundar C and Vishal's long-delayed comedy gets you to laugh out loud, even when you’re trying your hardest not to.
Director: Sundar C
Writer: Sundar C
Cast: Vishal, Santhanam, Sonu Sood, Anjali, Varalaxmi Sarathkumar, Manivannan, Sadagopan Ramesh
Language: Tamil
Sundar C’s long-delayed Madha Gaja Raja is not the sort of film you enter expecting complex interpersonal relationships or technical finesse. Even if we’d watched the film in 2012 — when it was originally set to release — we may still have found its scenes dated or objectionable. It’s as though we’re forced to remind ourselves that this film is a product of its time, urging us to be kinder because none of us knew any better.
Simpler times we no longer have the patience for; like that scene that follows when Raja (Vishal) learns that his friend’s wife has misplaced her gold necklace. Instead of launching an investigation, Raja offers his own gold chain and urges his friends to pool in to make up for the lost necklace. Or the other scene in which Raja deliberately loses a race, just so his rival feels respected in his hometown. Or even the over-the-top nobility with which Raja moves to Chennai to get a corporate honcho to return ₹ 52,20,350 to his broke bestie. It’s all sickeningly sweet, but you’d be shocked at how badly we want to buy into all this.
But in other scenes, we feel conflicted, wondering if times were ever that simple. I mean, when the same innocent Raja opens a bottle of goli soda, the marble from it miraculously bounces straight into Gajarani’s (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar) cleavage. Forget nuance, but the scene that introduces Gajarani is written around four males gazing at her while she’s bathing, with the joke written around who stares at her the most. She’s not really a character as much as a walking centrefold from magazines that were on sale in 2012.
But when it’s not aspiring to be sleazy, the film does a half-decent job aiming for the kind of silly humour we rarely see these days. This includes staples like a woman slipping on a banana peel, a man stepping on cow dung, and... the old classic: a wig falling off a man when he’s running. These are more amusing than funny, but it appeals to a part of you that hadn't yet googled the full meaning of the word "problematic".
And yet you never feel distanced from the film because Madha Gaja Raja, like most of Sundar C's works, is designed to not be taken seriously. We are not bothered by the flying bricks during a fight sequence, even when we can clearly see that they're made of thermocol. Or that silly scene at the end in which both Vishal and Sonu Sood fight bare-bodied, with a particularly long pause in the middle as though their nipples had to greet each other.
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This lack of seriousness is so effective that it's too silly to take offence. And if one joke or one of Santhanam’s many wisecracks don't land, you just wait 30 seconds for the film to try again. Take the example of what they do with a long stretch involving a corpse and a car chase. It’s clearly inspired from Weekend At Barnie’s (1989), but the context is so rooted in Sundar C’s style of humour that you find yourself happily buying into it.
The result is a film that gets you to laugh out loud, even when you’re trying your hardest not to. We may have come a long way from this brand of cinema, but speaking strictly as a product of its time, Madha Gaja Raja appeals to the part of you that laughed at “non-veg jokes” back when we were willing to pay ₹ 1.50 for them on SMS.