Coffee With Kadhal is a multi-starrer romantic drama genre flick featuring Jiiva, Jai, Srikanth, Yogi Babu, etc. Directed by the comedy expert Sundar.C and music is scored by Yuvan Shankar Raja.

Premise: 

Jiiva, Jai, Srikanth and DD are siblings. The former two are engaged but aren’t interested in marrying them. Srikanth and DD are already married but have issues with their partners. How the various conflicts of the characters smoothly resolve forms the rest of the film.

Writing/ Direction: 

Conflicts are the important factor of a dramatic flick, in that case, the director gets the base right here. The drama is effective as the conflicts between the characters are interesting and commercially viable, the setup is appealingly made in the interval block, paving way for a potentially blast-out latter. An in-form Sundar.C would have nailed this movie, unfortunately except for the root, nothing works out. Scenes clicking well are secondary, but here they are so irritating and suffer without any redeeming qualities. The writing is so bad that one person has to give a verbal introduction about the other in each and every single scene in the first half in the name of character establishments. Already a poor work on paper is even more terribly delivered on screen, right from the dialogues to how a situation is conveyed, everything has that amateurish feel. It’s fine if the story is predictable, but here the next sentence that a character is going to utter, leave out that, even who is going to make a cameo appearance is also easily guessable. The first half was at least passable, not in a good way, there were at least places to do mockery of, but the second half is a crashing bore. In simple words, the film is cringe before interval and melodramatic after. The saddest part is that the film missed on the usual grand gala Sundar.C template climax despite having the artist crowd.

Performances: 

Amidst the bunch, Jiiva did a comparatively better job, his presence was not disturbing at any given instance. Jai overacts and has atrociously too much makeup for his face. Srikanth couldn’t act and does no justice to his role. Yogi Babu and Kingsley portions are so silly, that isn’t the problem, but their comedies were nowhere funny, Yogi Babu’s multiple getups technique was a big bummer. The heroines struggle to perform, monotonous presence too, lip-sync issues and what not. DD couldn’t gracefully present herself here, like she always does on the television. Arya and VTV Ganesh’s cameo is such a waste, not their fault though.

Technicalities: 

The screenplay writing and direction failing on one end, the making is ridiculous. Starting from Yuvan’s music, there are so many songs but nothing is impressive. Such lazy work in terms of background score, all the tunes are like stock music for the mood. Camera work is the worst in recent times, the shots, lighting, colour grading, likewise it’s so basic in all levels. Editing is probably the weakest department here, it feels so because the filmmaker’s narrative is also a reason, the scene order is so random, there’s coherence at any point and it’s overly long too by having so much unwanted stuffing. Plenty of needless VFX usage even in some easy setups, it’s evident that special effects have been applied as it’s done in a notorious way.

Bottomline

Simple yet funny conflicts that have so much potential to make an enjoyable cinema, but nothing can save this flick which is messy in every aspect. Truly worried that the Sundar.C we all loved is permanently out of form.

Coffee With Kadhal - Cringe-Fest!