Prabhu Deva Power-Walks Through An Inept Film About An Incompetent Cop – FilmyVoice

Director: A. C. Mugil Chellappan
Forged: Prabhu Deva, Nivetha Pethuraj, Suresh Chandra Menon, Mahendran, Sudhanshu Pandey
Language: Tamil

Spoilers forward.

Reviewing an OTT movie is all the time a take a look at of self-control for me. Is it okay to pause and go to make myself a cup of tea? Can I reply to a textual content in the midst of the movie? Worst of all, am I nonetheless an expert if I fast-forward the songs? None of those are even selections whereas watching a movie in a theatre. The worst behaviour I permit myself there’s consuming popcorn. However, at house, in entrance of a TV, distant in hand, each movie is tough. Pon Manickavel has been a real agni-paritchai.

Author-director A. C. Mugil Chellappan’s Pon Manickavel is the story of an incompetent cop (Prabhu Deva) from Salem, who lets his gun be snatched by a laywoman, contained in the court docket premises, with which she shoots herself. He’s despatched to jail for it. A couple of months later, his seniors, for some weird cause, hail him to heaven and assign him to a high-profile homicide in Chennai.  “I don’t need any interference,” he says, asserting that he takes orders from nobody. His superiors agree, I can’t fathom why. He takes the case on and drags it about together with his incompetence. The one ineptitude that supersedes the hero’s is the filmmaker’s.

To start with, Pon Manickavel shouldn’t be a brand new/contemporary/modern movie by any means. In actual fact, nobody has any expectation that it might be. What we do count on from a police procedural is, maybe, some police and a few process. This one has loads of males in police uniform. Process, then again, is fairly flimsy. 

That is the movie which makes comparisons between the Scotland Yard and Tamilnadu police twice. It is usually the movie by which when a sniper shoots at somebody, a senior cop rushes to analyze by placing his eye into the small gap the bullet made in a big glass wall! It’s the movie by which a excessive court docket decide is decapitated and thrown at his doorstep within the early hours of the morning and nobody hears something — in truth, two ladies come operating immediately and start wailing on the physique a lot after the homicide. It’s the movie the place the righteous cop dances in an merchandise quantity to realize favours with the villain. The movie is brimming with incompetent police work that Scotland Yard might sue for defamation. In actual fact, even Tamilnadu police would have cause to.

Your entire first half goes in build up the cop — his love for his spouse, his dependancy to tea, some farming or cattle herding or one thing he’s serious about, his sense of brotherhood with fellow cops and so forth. There are some half-assed jokes about politics and paperwork, however the movie is so superficial that I had bother taking them critically.

Then, immediately, the movie begins shedding buckets and buckets of crocodile tears for victims of sexual violence. It goes via not one, however two rapes, each of which the hero is simply too incompetent to carry to democratic justice. There are lengthy excruciating depictions of sexual violence set to loud manipulative music. 

Aside from utilizing it as an excuse to unleash gratuitous violence on the world, this movie doesn’t care a lot about these ladies, or ladies normally in any respect. There may be not a single lady who’s a cop or contributes to the investigation or takes any worthwhile motion within the movie. Pon Manickavel’s spouse (a poor Nivetha Pethuraj) is seen making dosa, making ready dinner menu, being cute and so on. whereas struggling to move her exams. Additionally they speak about making kids after she graduates.

Alternatively, the boys hold making unusual selections. In a horrifying flip of occasions, Manickavel rescues a sufferer of sexual violence and takes her to his home as a substitute of a hospital. Apparently, all {that a} lady who has suffered violence and torture wants is one other lady giving her a glass of water and telling her that the person is entrance of her is like her “brother.” To completely nobody’s shock, Pon Manickavel’s resolution for violence towards ladies is…to kill all of them. In actual fact, the central query within the movie is, “why do cops have weapons if to not kill rapists?” In the event you nonetheless haven’t realised, it’s rhetorical.

Pon Manickavel is yet one more addition to a protracted line of males in uniform with an insatiable god-complex — a pattern that ought to fear us all. However, fortunately, the movie is unwatchable. So, more than likely, its impression on public consciousness will likely be minimal.