Imagine a sturdy house, brightly coloured, reasonably proportioned standing on wilting, slender sticks that barely support it amidst swirling flood-waters. That's Arowana Films' Thozha, directed by N Sundareshwaran.

At the end of the two-and-a-half hour torture session, you're left wondering if our movies have really come of age at all.
The first few scenes and stereotypes certainly don't help dispel that notion. Arivazhagan (Premji Amaren) and Gajini (Ajay Raj) are happy-go-lucky young men looking for jobs, ogling females and thinking nothing.

Gajini wants to make it big in movies; Arivazhagan wants a government job while Veluchamy comes to town from his native village to cut off a man's head. Needless to say, the Thozha who's everybody's dream friend is Raja (Nithin Sathya) and is a godsend in every way.

He helps out every single friend, from lending them money for their meals to settling sums on them and getting them married to their respective girlfriends. Ah, where can you get a friend who actually sets up your life for you, and then conveniently dies of an incurable disease?

To add to the terrible mix, you have four different love-stories with eminently forgettable heroines Swagithya, Jennifer, Sowmya and Lakshana. None of them can act to save their skins, while one of them dies within the first half hour, and then returns to prance around the countryside in a flashback. And there's a terrible politician-villain with the regulation henchmen, and police officer to boot. The commercial pot-boiler formula is thereby complete.

The jokes are stale, the dialogues are trite, the hero bashes up forty men in one stroke, sings the regulation duets -- and then sacrifices himself on the altar of friendship like the Sivaji movies of yore.

The movie's crowd-puller tagline, obviously, is that the 'Chennai 600028' team is back -- but at what cost?

None of the fab four have anything much to do. Nithin Sathya, who made such a flamboyant appearance in Satham Podathe is brooding, serious young man who staggers around with a brain aneurism. With his expressive eyes and face, you wonder why he chose to make a movie like this.

Premji Amaren swaggers and cracks inane jokes; it's left to Ajay Raj and Vasanth Vijay to add some brief comic elements and normalcy to the otherwise lacklustre movie.

Venniraadai Murthy, Kavithalaya Krishnan and Delhi Kumar are wasted.

Premji Amaren's music has been created to suit the screenplay of a classic, and so adds chaos to already senseless proceedings. The jokes in Thozha will leave you in tears and the emotionally charged tear-jerker scenes are guaranteed to have you laughing.