Udhayam NH4- A road journey you could hitch onto for its speed thrills.

Manimaran’s debut film, ‘Udhayam NH4 is a road story set on the NH4 highway connecting Bangalore to Chennai.
The film opens with a bird’s eye view of this highway and we listen to a group of young men as they discuss their plan of kidnapping Rithika, a college student.  Mission accomplished, Prabhu and his friends find themselves on the run taking NH4, the shortest route to Chennai from Bangalore.
Rithika’s father, a politician from the state of Karnataka puts cop Manoj Menon on the job of bringing home his daughter by midnight before she turns major. He also instructs Menon to keep this mishap a secret since it could sabotage his political ambitions.
Menon soon learns that Rithika has actually eloped with her lover, Prabhu.
And, indebted to the politician for a favour in the past, Menon continues with his chase.  What makes this pursuit interesting is the use of technology that Menon employs to track Prabhu, via his mobile SIM card and access to social networking sites. As you watch the cat and mouse game of Menon and Prabhu, Manimaran reveals Prabhu’s and Rithika’s love story, shuttling between the past and the present.
Complementing this racy narrative is the excellent camera work by Velraj.  Without relying on double entendres and toilet jokes, here is a Tamil film that comes with clean humour. You chuckle as you watch Prabhu’s friends trying to impress girls in a pub, you smile at Menon’s assistant when he goofs up and you laugh when Rithika’s former lover shares stories of their college days.
Tender moments from a tough cop’s life are disclosed over tele-conversations that Menon has with his wife. We recognize her only by her voice as she often interrupts him at work that day, to remind him of their six-year-old son’s birthday party at home.
Lending an authentic feel to the story is the different languages spoken by the cast, Kannada dialogues spoken by Rithika, her father and his goons as well as Menon’s Malayalam conversations with his son.  
In the acting department, Siddharth’s lover boy image fits the role of Prabhu perfectly. New comer, Ashrita Shetty captures the innocence of Rithika’s character well. Endearing himself to the audience is Bollywood actor Kay Kay Menon, who comes up with a terrific performance as Menon, the cop.
Of course, this story is not new and predictable too, yet it’s the treatment that makes ‘Udhayam NH4’ worth a watch.