Madhavan Anchors An Otherwise Wobbly Tale Of Greed & Self-Cancellation

It is astounding what one powerful performance can do to a film, given the correct contextual compulsion. In this well-written but not-so-effectively executed film, Madhavan, in his second grey outing in a row after Shaitaan, plays Saravan, a born loser who dreams of making a scientific breakthrough while trying to wrestle with imminent insolvency and a wife whom he is about to lose.

Saravan has nothing to lose in life. On the other side of the social fence is Arjun, a superstar test cricketer on the skids, played by Siddharth, who seems to rein in his performance at those very moments when he needed to explode on screen.

Less is not more on this occasion- not when Siddharth’s adversary is played by Madhavan as a no-holds-barred desperado. Watching the likeable but incomplete portrait of ruination and redemption, I wondered what Test would have been had Siddharth played the character a few octaves higher. His graph as a grumpy father and unsporting cricketer goes too hastily from insufferable to redemptive… No, I wasn’t convinced, especially in how his conscience opens up on the field even at the risk of losing his son.

There is nobility in Arjun’s character’s lunge to a moral high ground. But I am not sure Arjun is acting in character. The screenplay (S Sashikanth and Suman Kumar) tends to lose sight of its characters’ journeys. There is simply too much happening on paper, but not enough on screen.

Life-fixing, match-fixing… Who is to fix the loopholes in the storytelling? While the narration focuses almost entirely on the Saravan-Arjun combat to the finish, middlemen show up in the moral hectoring to spruce up the edges in the plot.

The match-fixing mafia is just not intimidating enough to be considered a serious menace. The flighty way Saravan manipulates them to his own advantage creates a serious rift between the plot’s intentions and its implementation.

There is another angle- yes, one more!- to the plot, with Arjun being a father (albeit a negligent one) and Saravan being childless. His wife, Kumudha, is trying desperately for a child through IVF.

The battle between procreation and sterility is, at best, an interesting thought which, like a lot else in the film, gets drowned in a fidgety narration.

The weakest link in the conflict of interests on the playing field and off it is Nayanthara as Saravan’s wife, Kumudha. Nayanthara plays her as a childless nurturer coping with her own maternal cravings and spousal disappointments. Nothing in her demeanour suggests any genuine empathy for her character. With her fancy nails, Nayanthara doesn’t even get the externals of her character right.

The film itself gets a lot of the surface details right but stumbles when pushing deeper.