Sure, VA Quarter Cutting is a change from your average Tamil movie, which invariably is a soporific, cronge-inducing romance.

Maybe even better than the trash that emerges from the Kollywood sewers most Fridays.

Although different, VA Quarter Cutting (directed by Pushkar-Gayatri) is not the kind of movie that keeps your eyes glued to the screen.

For one, the movie at about 2 hours and 20 minute is too long given its bare-bone theme of a young fella’s desperate late-night search, in the company of his future brother-in-law, for a liquor bottle in Chennai.

You may sympathize with the desperate cravings of our young man Sura (Shiva) if you know that he’s leaving in the morning for Saudi Arabia where booze is, of course, verboten.

Shiva plays the young man Sura and S.P.B.Charan his future brother-in-law Marthandam.

Guy Ritchie Redux
VA Quarter Cutting is a Guy Ritchie style movie.

Frenetic in its wild, quirky action and with a large cast of oddball, colorful characters (of different sizes ranging from midgets to giants) engaging in all sorts of weird antics. Think Snatch, think Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, think RocknRolla. Hell, think even Sherlock Holmes (the Robert Downey version).

Not surprisingly, we even heard echoes of the music from Guy Ritchie’s film Sherlock Holmes in VA Quarter Cutting. If you are curious, we are referring to Hans Zimmer’s Discombobulate track from Sherlock Holmes.

Besides our two main characters, in VA Quarter Cutting we have an arsonist, a father-son duo running an illegal gambling center, two underlings of the gambling den owners, a female cop, a suicidal young girl et al.

Lekha Washington is Saro, the young girl, who has turned suicidal, after repeatedly flunking her school exams.

While the Guy Ritchie genre may be new to Tamil movies, it’s not new per se. Just an extension of this style to Tamil films.

None of the characters disappoint but they don’t light up the screen either. Shiva and S.P.B.Charan hog the maximum screen time.

The dialogs do not sparkle, merely adequate.

Overall, we’d say VA Quarter Cutting is an okayish film.