‘Maruthi Nagar Police Station’ movie review: A choppily written, patience-testing murder mystery – The Hindu
Dayal Padmanabhan’s Maruthi Nagar Police Station begins with the kidnap of a schoolgirl. The mother and father of the lady search the assistance of the police however the cop, who’s in cahoots with the abductors, advises the mother and father to offer him what he needs — their land. The mother and father reluctantly file a grievance and return residence to search out the extortionist, Pallavaram ‘Potlam’ Naga, consuming at their eating desk. Upon seeing the mother and father, Naga, with a straight face, says, “ Ponnu kaanaama pona veetla, kari meen ah irukkum? Adhaan, naane upma panni saapten” [In a house where the daughter has gone missing, I understand if there isn’t meat. So, I made some upma for myself.] I simply burst out laughing. The state of affairs is so… hilariously absurd. For a second, I anticipated the movie to be a Soodhu Kavvum-type black comedy.
However because the movie progressed, I painfully realised it was unintended humour because the meant jokes evoke as a lot laughter as a funeral procession. Pattern: A man named Suresh involves the police station to complain about his lacking canine named Ramesh. Ramesh-Suresh… get it? You aren’t laughing but? Right here’s one other one: A cop tells one other cop, “When a canine is misplaced, the proprietor information a grievance. However when the proprietor goes lacking, has a canine ever filed a grievance? What a thriller!” The cop, to be truthful, is proven as a PJ-cracking boomer. However why even dedicate screentime for these items in a homicide thriller as a substitute of specializing in creating pressure and thrill?
Maruthi Nagar Police Station (Tamil)
The movie suffers from a wafer-thin plot and shallow characters. The entire story pivots across the dying of Jaishankar (performed by Mahat Raghavendra), an orphan for whom his mates, together with his girlfriend Archana (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar), are his household. We get a montage track of them rising up in an orphanage and later, as adults, pulling pranks at one another and doing different cliched cute issues. However this hardly does something to sympathise with Jaishankar or empathise together with his mates, who need to avenge his dying.
A variety of the data is not only spoon-fed, they’re spoon-thrust to us. Each time one thing seemingly surprising occurs, we get a flashback that patronisingly explains the sequence of occasions like an uncle deconstructing a rudimentary magic trick to his five-year-old nephew. For causes unfathomable, the movie pauses for a second on some eight or 9 events to determine the time and date. This serves no actual function aside from to interrupt the movement of the narration. In a single occasion, a personality actually says “Come meet me at my workplace tomorrow at 7 pm.” Within the subsequent shot, there’s textual content on the display screen informing us, “Subsequent Day, 7 pm.”
Dayal, who has additionally written the movie, makes an attempt a non-linear narration however that hardly helps in making the proceedings participating. The back-and-forth storytelling ends in frustration fairly than intrigue. The plot twists lack any sense of shock or ingenuity. Because the story unfolds, it turns into obvious who the offender is, making the supposed twists really feel pressured and unexciting. Archana and her mates plan on killing the murderers of Jaishankar. However another person does it earlier than them. This occurs on the midway mark of the movie. The second half is about discovering out who did it and why; each revelations really feel flatter than a heat fizzless soda on a summer time afternoon.
The expository-heavy dialogues are clichéd and uninspired, failing to ship the sharp and witty exchanges anticipated in a whodunnit thriller. The performances, too, fail to raise the underwritten characters. It’s simply tough to look after any of them on this whodunnit. Or, I-don’t-care-whodunnit.
Maruthi Nagar Police Station is at the moment streaming on Aha
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