“Mr. Chandramouli”… A would-be conspiracy thriller derailed by bad writing and infantile filmmaking

Spoilers ahead…

Read the full review on Film Companion, here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/mr-chandramouli-movie-review-baradwaj-rangan-tamil-gautham-karthik-regina

Karthik fans looking for some nostalgia will probably enjoy Mr. Chandramouli a little more than others. There’s that title, first. And the lyrics of a club song, tuned by Sam CS, include phrases like “panivizhum malarvanam” and “rajadhi raja.” The actor’s performance, too, is reminiscent of the times he’d show up on screen, trying to be cool and funny and casual, and the audience would find it all wincingly painful. The character, after whom the film is named, is painful too. He has a Premier Padmini that’s clearly seen better days, though he says it was driven, in the eighties, by Al Pacino, Marlon Brando and Meryl Streep. I think we’re meant to laugh, as with this other line, uttered during breakfast, when he hands a visiting card to his son, Raghav (Gautam Karthik), and says, “Dosai nu nenachu saaptudaadhey.”

Is this a nod to the Agni Natchatiram scene where Karthik played the job-seeking son, and got a visiting card from his father? Hard to say. That could be your response to most questions in this loud, dreary film, written and directed by Thiru, along the lines of his much-better Naan Sigappu Manidhan. Is Raghav a boxer because the sport actually shapes the character in a meaningful way? Hard to say. There’s an action scene towards the end, but it doesn’t really depend on the hero’s boxing expertise. Maybe they thought it would sound cool to say “the hero is a boxer,” just as they thought it would be cool to say “the hero’s friend (Sathish) is named Padmini” or “the heroine (Regina Cassandra) is basically in the film because of a song in which she appears in a swimsuit.”

Continued at the link above.

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Posted in: Cinema: Tamil