Inba: Shaam can’t shave, this movie!

Genre: Action
Director: S.T. Vendhan
Cast: Shaam, Sneha, Arun Pandian, Aravind Akash, Aditya
Storyline: A rich girl falls in love with her bearded bodyguard
Bottomline: Capital Punishment

All you baby-faced heroes with chocolate-boy looks, learn from Shaam. Yes, you too Abbas. Here’s how you make the transition from lover boy to macho man.

First. Grow a beard. The Metrosexual look will not take you beyond the metro. Paruthiveeran would not have looked like a ‘veeran’ without facial hair. Chithiram Pesudhadi would’ve been incomplete without the ‘dhadi’. The beard helps in defining character – it instantly tells us the basics. One, he’s poor. He’s got no money to shave. Two, he’s hiding a sad story behind the beard. Also, keeping a beard may just fool and draw at least a small per cent of Vijaya T. Rajendherr fans out of mistaken identity.

Two. Talk less, smile even less. Let your hands do all the talking. Let’s say someone comes and asks you what time it is. If you tell him the time, you become an extra and he becomes the hero. So don’t reply. Give him one across the face. Next, the girl. In an action film, you don’t woo the girl. The girl should woo you. Never ever smile at her. This adds mystery to the two already established points of character-development. Even if she does not like you in the beginning, once she sees you beat up guys, she’ll get scared and learn to behave. First, she may hire you to protect her and later realise it’s probably cheaper to get your lifetime services.

Thirdly, it is very important, absolutely necessary to throw in a Superstar tribute. Make sure there are at least ten rows of extras dancing behind you. This usually gives dance masters ample scope to choreograph according to your limitations. Besides, the dance steps in the movies these days are so ridiculous that unless you have a hundred of them doing it at the same time, you can’t say: Come on. See, everyone’s doing it. It’s cool.

Fourth, the flashback. Throw in a 15-20 minute sequence where you are a 12th standard student. If you were Little Superstar or Chiyaan Vikram, you could’ve played the role yourself, knocking off some kilos. But since, you are not yet so blessed with that kind of versatility, you get some promising young actor to essay your past. (On a more serious note, this is the single most mature thing Shaam has done in the movie – not passed off as a standard 12 student). This sequence should involve a tragedy.

Fifth, the quintessential, most definitive trait of being a mass hero – the dandanaka – the traditional dead body dance. If you are an import from another city, here’s how you get a hold of the basics. A. Start with the face. Stick your tongue out and bite it. B. Pretend you’re flying a kite and pulling the thread. C. Wear a lungi or at least tie-up the two ends of the shirt instead of buttoning it and do the pelvic thrusts at 40 per minute, making lustful advances at the heroine.

So that’s how Shaam turned into a mass hero Inba with director Vendhan’s insightful inputs. A mass hero does not have one villain – he has many. So there’s Arun Pandian (Malai da… Malai Ganesan goes the original punch-line) forced to play over the top, there’s the Chennai 28 boy Aravind Akash made to play pervert and there’s Billa’s Aditya as his evil brother and they all with their men, take turns to provide six fights while

Sneha is solely entrusted with the task of making the film look good, dancing to loop-based music (P.B. Balaji). Poor Rekha and Sulakshana make an earnest attempt like the rest of the cast but there’s only so much you can do in a mass-hero film. And we won’t even talk about the horror unleashed in the name of Kanja Karuppu’s ‘kaamedy’.

By all means, go for Inba. It’s the most inspiring piece of Tamil cinema. If this chap can make a movie, so can you.