Movie critics are ripping into Rajinikanth’s Kuselan and showing it the middle finger.

No suprise. No surprise.

After all, Kuselan is a piece of trash and an affront to all notions of art.

Here’s a sample of the critical reviews that this Kuselan garbage has received:

Deccan Herald:

It’s a big con to exploit brand Rajni and make a quick buck. He himself gallops in on a flying horse almost half way through the tortuous proceedings. His oneliners and quirks fall flat. If at all we are able to see flashes of the Rajni of yore, it’s towards the dying moments. By then it’s too late.

….Vasu’s work looks like a haircut done with a pair of shears.

Mid-Day:

The ‘cinema-cinema’ song that was supposed to be the crowning glory celebrating 75 years of cinema in South India and the entry of Rajini into the film passes, leaving no sense of celebration or excitement.

We’re left wondering if the direction went wrong, or was it the music, or was it just bad editing? We still have no clue.

The movie continues with hard to laugh at comedy sequences, badly edited scenes, alien songs that have no place in the screenplay and an overall sense of a thorough waste of time

SearchIndia.com:

Kuselan is not a ode to friendship although some have wrongly tried to characterize it as such. Au contraire, it’s an odiously bad crap-show, the likes of which we are mercifully seldom subjected to even in the augean gullies and bylanes of Kollywood.

Friendship, the supposed leitmotif of the movie, never comes to life in Kuselan because the movie, very early on, goes off track into infantile comedy and nauseating refrains about the superstar.

BehindWoods:

Director P. Vasu’s take on Srinivasan’s Kathaparyumbol attempts to show Rajini in a different light, only with a different screen name….However, in the process, and probably due to the overwhelming presence of the superstar, the delightful story about two friends is regrettably lost.

Sify:

The film tries desperately to glorify Rajinikanth’s larger than life superstardom and create a halo around him as a do-gooder and a saint in real life. It loses its focus and moves away from the gist of the original, which was a simple story about human emotions, based on friendship between an ordinary barber and a superstar.

Balaji’s Thots:

P.Vasu is one of those directors who is stuck in the past and his movies are painfully old-fashioned. He seems oblivious to the huge advances in moviemaking technology and techniques and sticks to ancient methods. Whether its the comedy, the script, the way he films sequences or the special effects, everything is loud and overt. Even then, the crassness in the film comes as an unpleasant surprise….The vulgarity is not new or worse than that in many other films but sticks out here because of the emotional theme, the presence of Rajni and the fact that it is being called a ‘clean family film’ …

Sure, a few of the above critics also have positive things to say about some aspects of Kuselan but on the whole the reviews taken together suggest that this movie has not found favor with the critics.

Unless you have a lot of time to waste and plenty of money to burn, Rajinikanth’s Kuselan is the kind of movie that deserves to be shown the middle finger.

P.S: There were about 25-30 people in the hall for the 3:00PM screening (on Friday, August 1, 2008) of Kuselan at Multiplex Cinemas (Towne Center), East Windsor (New Jersey). Definitely not a great response.