Dikkiloona – A solid premise for a comedy goes wasted!

Bharath Vijayakumar

In one of the earlier scenes of Dikkiloona, a scientist makes his entry aided by a crutch. Santhanam mocks him and refers to the crutch as a side stand. This was probably an attempt at a joke. Maybe in a theatre, a couple of laughs would have helped to confirm. Thankfully in OTT, you can at least assume that this wasn’t the case. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. But the makers of Dikkiloona are keen to prove you wrong. Body shaming and regressive ideas passing off for jokes keep recurring in this sci-fi comedy.

The one liner of Dikkiloona is very similar to last year’s Oh My Kadavule. Mani (Santhanam) uses a time machine to go back to the past and stop his marriage. He is successful in his mission but soon realizes the value of what he has lost. But unlike Oh My Kadavule that explored the dimensions of both the guy and the girl, Dikkiloona plays out like a male fantasy. Well, that is the prerogative of the filmmaker on how he wants to tell the story. But what is problematic in the film is that it tries to shame one woman for her choices to justify the hero’s decision to go back to his initial love.

Dikkiloona doesn’t waste time any time in getting to the plot and the initial few minutes show some promise. The setup is wacky and even if all the jokes don’t work, there is this feel that the film isn’t really taking itself seriously. Usually when this sort of a feel is established, you end up having fun or at the worst it could turn out to be a film that doesn’t bother you much. The film keeps up this momentum in the first hour or so but it starts to test your patience as it progresses. There are a few jokes here and there that work but with the kind of regressive ideas the film propagates, it becomes very difficult to laugh. In one scene, Santhanam goes to meet his father-in-law. When asked about the purpose of his visit, he says, “If we end up purchasing a defective product, we go back to the shopkeeper right?”. Well, that is precisely how this film sees its women, as ‘products’.

The standard of comedy films in Tamil cinema hasn’t been great of late and it probably isn’t fair to single out Dikkiloona. But when the makers themselves include a song from a film like Michael Madana Kaama Rajan, you can’t help but recollect some great comedy films from the past and sigh at how low the bar has fallen. And to be honest, the premise of Dikkiloona has a lot of scope for comedy.

Bottomline:

Santhanam uses the time machine and keeps jumping timelines in search of happiness. He finds it in the climax of the film. But the search for laughter in Dikkiloona ends in vain.

Rating: 2/5