Venkat Prabu's Brand of Ghosts.

  Tamil audience have been interestingly exposed to a variety of narrations of stories on benign, ridiculous and serious types of ghosts on the big screen.It has been a season of ghosts haunting us in celluloid form.The list has been considerably vast with entries like Pizza, Darling, Aranmanai, Pisasu and Kanchana making a special impact. Now  it is ''Maasu'',from the Studio Green Production house under the direction of Venkat Prabu.The director has not got out of his formula of crime and comedy, this time with an addition of a plethora of ghosts dominating the screen.His usual thrust on fraud, Hawala and the lure for money being  a vital ingredient of a Venket special, also finds prominence in this ghost ridden action entertainer.
   The initial scenes make it a strenuous necessity to correlate one with the other. Suriya has remained as the major source of strength in two roles as father and son, the former as a ghost character with a magnificently brief flashback. Suriya has put in his muscles and brain for a convincingly stylish performance talking Tamil, in the Chennai and Srilankan dialect and accent. Premji Amaran is behind Suriya for the most part of the film, both alive and dead[as a ghost] flashing his own style of humour here and there.Including Shanmugasundaram, there are more than half a dozen ghosts each with a pre mortal desire, remaining unfulfilled.With the arrival of the ghost of senior Suriya,the narration takes a more serious turn with events running one after the other, at a ghastly[ghostly too] speed.I think Yuvan is best only for melodies[Almost all his songs in Payya keep ringing in my ears.]His background score is a bit noisy and in most scenes the music component seems to swallow the dialogues.He could have learnt a couple of notes from his Dad's composition for Pisaasu.
   Samuthirakani has returned as a villain after Subramanyapuram.Parthiban is his usual stuff wherever he is and whatever role he performs.His cheeky sense of humour asks for more.It is his light minded approach to cinema that makes Venkat Prabu an endearing film maker.Though there is enough of it here,it does not fill one's expectation as his Mangaathaa and Saroja did.As the narration is half lighter and half serious, we do not know where we have to fix ourselves in watching the film.Though the first half of the film went off fast, without much to fall back upon,the second half came as an over loaded container, unable to unload the whole stuff for an easy and clear delivery.Is it a crime masala, or a ghost story, or a combination of both, in humour-cum-gravity mode,only Venkat Prabu should say.The women characters dissipate into thin air,in an atmosphere crowded by ghosts and criminals.I would not call it a gripping tale of ghosts.Nor would I rate it as an impressive action movie.But definitely it is somewhere  between the two.