Anbu Thollai makes a strong case for Pandiarajan quitting movies altogether. The actor, who directed and starred in Aanpaavam, one of the funniest and most popular comedies in Tamil, seems determined to see his career go up in flames by starring in movies like this. Though it is still early in the year, I can say with utmost confidence that Anbu Thollai will end up on my Worst-10 list for 2003.

Singamuthu(Pandiarajan) adores his two younger brothers and is insistent that the three of them marry three girls who are sisters also. His uncle's daughter Chinnathayi(Ravali) wants to wed him and drives away any such alliances. But Singamuthu's brothers feel stifled by his affections and want out. Meanwhile, his uncle Devarajan(R.Sunderrajan), who had a failed love affair with Padmini(Shakeela) and is now widowed, wishes to give her a new lease of life(she is also widowed) by marrying her.

The movie starts off with a young Pandiarajan doing all the things that doting elder brothers in Tamil movies do. He has given up studying so that his brothers can continue to go to school and carried them to school on his shoulders. But the result of this trek to school makes it clear that the movie is aiming to be a comedy. It is definitely a funny joke but unfortunately, it is also the only funny joke in the entire movie. The rest of the movie is a collection of lame jokes, unfunny one liners, bad acting, ridiculous situations and vulgar songs.

It appears that the only aim of the movie is to make fun of other famous, infinitely better movies. The director seems to have thought that ridiculing other movies is automatically funny. So the entire movie is a collection of incidents (with no logical flow whatsoever) designed to recreate scenes from other movies. Prabhu's singing in Chinna Thambi, Kamal's drunken dance on the well in Salangai Oli, Nasser's flashback in Jeans and Vijayakanth's singing to Revathi's dance in Vaidehi Kathirundhaal are just some of the sequences imitated by the director here. Used sparingly and cleverly, this format has a chance of being funny (as Vivek's take on Moondraam Pirai in Run showed) but the bombardment in Anbu Thollai grows tiring pretty soon. We just end up wishing that we were watching one of those movies instead!

The few other 'original' scenes in the movie simply prove that the director does not have a singly funny idea in him. But he displays his name in the middle of the movie after a key scene a la Bagyaraj. The repeated scenes at the panchayat test one's patience and the scenes proving Pandiarajan's love for his brothers are overdone. So the director turns to vulgarity but that is just the last nail in the coffin. Ravali's blatant attempts at seducing Pandiarajan are raunchy and indecent and there are double entendres littered all over the movie. Even romance is not spared as the few meetings between Chinni Jayanth and his brother and their lovers are overly suggestive and crude.

Pandiarajan seems to be taking a step backward with each new movie and has reached the nadir with this one. Ravali's career seems filled with such poor entries(she was also seen in the devotional classic Nagalingam!). R.Sunderrajan, who can be funny with the right script, is irritating. Surprisingly Shakeela, the queen of soft porn Malayalam movies, appears in a decent role. Soundaryan's songs suit the movie.

Take away the Anbu from the title and that is an accurate description of this movie!