Comali Review - A middling comedy that becomes preachy!

Bharath Vijayakumar

Debutant Pradeep's Comali has a knockout idea at its core. From the trailer that had become viral you are aware that it is a comedy about the hero regaining his senses after being in coma for 16 years. The period that the film is set in, is what makes it all the more fascinating. Imagine someone going to sleep in 2000 and waking up in 2016.

Every generation probably would have their own say but those who had their childhood in the 90s and early 2000s would vouch for the fact that the changes that happened during this period were drastic and yet you probably weren't even realizing the transformation that was taking place. While a normal middleclass household probably got their first landline in the 90s, within a decade almost everyone had a mobile which now by default means a smartphone. This is the generation that would have laid their hands on both a cassette player and an ipad. Heck! Cricket in fact has produced a new format, the masses friendly T20 in this period. Well, you might be reading this review a few hours after the first show of the movie while you probably had to wait a week few years earlier.

The premise ensures that Comali is adequately entertaining right from the word go. The first half in fact races ahead. It is what you would call an easy watch till this point. You are not laughing out loud but the smiles are rather consistent. Jayam Ravi keeps it simple and Yogi Babu is effective in a rather sudbued avatar. Plot driven comedies have become a rarity in Tamil cinema these days and this makes Comali more enjoyable than it probaby is.

It is when the film decides to get a little emotional and preachy that it starts losing its grip over us. Wanting to tell a message is never an issue but having the hero sort of directly deliver the message like a speech to us is. If in Vanamagan Jayam Ravi played a tribal who came to town to teach humanity, here he comes back from slumber to remind us of the little joys we have lost because of our addiction to technology. The emotional scenes are primal and thrust in out of nowhere. The film begins as a comedy , becomes a little sentimental midway and then ends on a preachy note. The messages have the same impact as a forward message or a meme would have. It is more disheartening here because the message in Comali is actually very much part of the core of the film. But it never feels organic.

Bottomline:

Comali is a pretty easy watch with some nice ideas and few genuinely comic moments. The emotional portions and preachy tone are what pull it back. The film sort of fits in too many things rather haphazardly.

Rating: 2.75/5