Kazhugu (2012) - My view and a brief review

Certainly, Kazhugu (2012) is a movie that falls along the lines of Sethu (1999), Pithamagan (2003), and Paruthiveeran (2007). Camaraderie, friendship, joviality, love, innocence, and vengeance and tragedy, are the emotions running along in full swing in all these movies. Not to mention the soulful music for the company of the empathetic viewers.

If I were to reverse-engineer and develop a hints-development structure of the story, it would be as follows:

establishing a setting - introducing the associates of the story - character sketching along with occupation - introducing the protagonist's love-interest - falling for each other - a casual but a serious or an unrelated happening related to the antagonist - protagonist's part in this happening - innocent or naive or daring decision by protagonist - serious and unexpected repercussion affecting protagonist - vengeance - tragedy.

Maybe, the sequence of two consecutive events can be interchanged and yet, the above structure holds good for all these movies.

Maybe there are other such movies that I have missed; but there is definite correlation and a lot more similarities in all these four movies. Of the four movies, Ilayaraja and Yuvan Shankar Raja (YSR) have composed music for two each, Ilayaraja for the former two movies in the timeline and YSR for the latter two. All these movies have taken a minimum of two years for production, from start of project to the finish. Each such movie has been released with a minimum gap of four years--long enough to avert making the theme a cliched or a stereotyped one. 

One distinct difference is with the title--the rest of the movies have the protagonist's name as the title, whereas here, it is the occupation that takes the main seat. In fact, it is a very apt name because the story revolves around the protagonist's occupation. Indeed, it is a beautiful analogy. The eagle (kazhugu) makes its survival on the carcass and here the protagonist makes his living with that of those who die from clifftops.

Though Kazhugu maybe flawed or has its weak-points at certain areas of film-making, and I am not sure if Kazhugu was a great commercial hit compared to the others, but it is still a laudable effort from the team.