Before watching this movie, I was a wee bit curious of its content! Curious, because the subject was on bike racing - I really can't recollect any movie in Tamil based on such a theme. So that was one good enough reason for me to catch up. I was also expecting some thrills and decent stunts coupled with an engaging story line - was I expecting too much? The answer is a resounding yes!!
The movie opens up with a biker whizzing past a flock of graphically created (read it as pathetically made out) crows, only to end up in a crash. The dream of Prithviraj (Atharva) dissolves and he reveals the fateful day where he lost his father due to his negligence in driving a motorbike. So we get a slice of his life where he is depicted as a typical happy-go lucky guy who works part-time at a pizza joint and always ends up delivering the pizza late (for free), thanks to his heedful driving. He obeys traffic rules, hates people driving rashly and is seen as an ideal boy-next-door by everyone surrounding him. He meets Samyuktha (Priya Anand) and its love at first sight - “best friends” as they call it. He even goes on to buy a Ducati in order to impress his best friend. Then comes a lame twist in the tale where he has to rekindle his racing instincts in order to win his girl back from the antagonist!!
Debut director Yuvraj Bose has undoubtedly wanted to deliver a glossy package of masala with the ever stale one-line story of ‘Ramayana’. But at this age of noir and neo-liberal movies, can't this story be made on a much more engaging scale? The only relief that came in as a visual pleasure was that the movie was set in Pondicherry with it’s characteristic offbeat locales that partially gelled with the narrative.
Amongst the cast, only Devadarshini who has been demoted as Atharva’s mother has managed to score. Even Atharva looked lost and made one to feel that his performance in his last outing in ‘Paradesi’ was just a one off. Priya Anand as the trademark ‘loosu penn’ Tamil heroine had nothing going for her. Raai Laxmi was made to run around with skimpy clothes with hardly anything to offer, Johnny Triguyen was reduced to our ‘rowdy next door’ and Jegan who is supposed to have ushered in the comic relief was not given much space. Also GV Prakash’s music needs a facelift badly. The title BGM made me feel if the theater speakers were defective. It sounded horrible.
By the time the twist in the tale was revealed, half the audience were dozy enough and were not even ready to acknowledge that the last big race was coming their way. All we ended up was with a ridiculously packaged empty gift hamper after all the glossy covers that came of it.
Verdict: Give it a miss!
Rating: 1.5 / 5
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