Vaathi

Vaathi had a successful opening day at the box office, bringing in roughly Rs 15 crore net for India.

The views expressed here are that of the respective authors/ entities and do not represent the views of Economic Times (ET). [Telugu](/topic/telugu), and it was expected to gross Rs 14 crore on day one at the box office. Dhanush, on the other hand, begins fighting the education mafia after discovering the true purpose of sending them to rural areas. Prakash Kumar, music director, collaborated to achieve the highest visual and audio quality. [Venky Atluri](/topic/venky-atluri), is a social drama about education. Dhanush is one of the lecturers who is sent as a faculty after the chairman of a private educational institution announces the adoption of several government colleges to provide better education to students in rural areas.

Atluri, who has made his first Tamil film after three in Telugu, manages to harness Dhanush's star-actor credentials.

In one telling scene, a group of students refuses to sit next to the other bunch because of their caste identity. Keeping in the tradition of many mainstream Tamil films in the recent past, Vaathi addresses caste as a social barrier to accessing even fundamental rights like education. From this point forth, the 140-minute film traces Balamurugan’s struggle to get the children back in school and Srinivasa’s schemes to keep high-quality education restricted to the affluent class. From hereon, the film moves back to the late ‘90s, and Balamurugan (Dhanush), a junior assistant maths teacher at Thirupathi Educational Institutions, steps in. In a bid to resurrect the government schools, the head of the educational institution and president of the private schools’ association, Srinivasa (Samuthirakani) deploys some teachers with poor or no track record and stops the government from implementing a ‘free education for all’ bill. Vaathi is not saying something drastically different but when is it a bad idea to witness Dhanush perform in a well-intentioned film?

Directed by Venky Atluri, Telugu-Tamil bilingual 'Vaathi' - 'Sir' stars Dhanush and Samyuktha Menon in the lead roles.

However, the film has released today with the original title and there is no change to it as of now. Ahead of the film's release, the Puducherry State Teacher Federation filed a petition to change the title from ‘Vaathi’ to ‘Vaathiyar’ stating the word ‘Vaathi’ is demeaning to teachers. At the pre-release event, Dhanush recalled his first Telugu film and said, “When my first film was released in 2002, I was nervous and now in 2023 for my first Telugu film release, I am more nervous.

Vaathi movie review: Despite having a stellar plot that could have helped director Venky Atluri create a good entertainer, this Dhanush-starrer proves that ...

In these sequences, Atluri also shows a cinema hall transforming into a school, highlighting the power of motion pictures. While he falls in love with her at first sight (as is customary), Meenakshi develops feelings for Balamurugan after hearing him give a (completely uninspiring) speech to the villagers about how Dr APJ Abdul Kalam became “The Missile Man”, making their bond appear childish. The scene in which Bala Sir teaches his students about caste discrimination as a social ill thus becomes meaningful, even with the tepid dialogues. It is only towards the end when he appears looking like Raavanan and Bharathiyar (in different scenes), that the film provides some kind of goosebumps in its entire running time of about 140 minutes. This happens after Srinivasa Thirupathi (Samuthirakani), the head of Thirupathi Educational Institutions and president of the private schools’ association, offers a ‘helping hand’ to the failing government schools by agreeing to send some teachers from private schools to their state-owned counterparts. Their search for the teacher takes them to a District Collector who, upon seeing the cassettes, beams with pride and says that he was the teacher’s student.

It is when the film goes a little easier on itself that we get portions where it's most inventive. Especially, there is a lightness when it transforms into ...

It is a highly melodramatic sequence that is meant to show the pain Bala goes through in his efforts to keep teaching. In this, not only does it speak about the cinema hall becoming a temple of learning, but it also creates the space for Bala to keep appearing in different costumes (including that of Subramania Bharathi) without the effect feeling too contrived. But it is the manner in which we arrive at foreseeable plot points that makes it hard to keep engaging with Vaathi. The main antagonist here (played by Samuthirakani) is a man who is not just the pioneer of private education in Tamil Nadu but he is also Balamurugan’s ( Be it a film like Saattai (2012), the more recent [Master](https://www.filmcompanion.in/reviews/master-movie-review-tamil-vijay-thalapathy-flaws-and-all-lokesh-kanagaraj-delivers-a-classy-mass-movie-vijay-sethupathi-baradwaj-rangan) (2021), or [Nammavar](https://www.filmcompanion.in/features/super-30-kamal-haasans-nammavar-and-the-inspirational-teacher-trope-in-cinema) (1994) which inspired the Lokesh film, it’s as though it is only a matter of time before we get another montage of a campus cleanup featuring annoyingly gleeful students. [teacher as a saviour](https://www.filmcompanion.in/fc-lists/10-teachers-from-tamil-cinema-we-love-master-nammavar-saattai-pasanga) has been a part of our movies for so long that it has become easy to predict the ebbs and flows of the subgenre.