Kingston Review - A New Concept, Messed Up with Poor Screenwriting!

Ashwin Ram

Kingston is a mystery thriller starring GV Prakash and Divyabharathi in the lead roles. Directed by debutant Kamal Prakash.

Premise:

A village near Thoothukudi where fishing is everyone’s work life. Due to a dark past, there has been a ban from entering the waters as the sea is said to be cursed. How GV Prakash breaks barriers and saves his people forms the remaining story.

Writing/ Direction:

The sea monster element is the unique selling point, unfortunately the focus is nowhere to that. The core story is thin, but the director has unnecessarily complicated it with excessive writing just to make things interesting. Over coating the content by forming plenty of layers around misfires, the anticipation to experience the exciting core deteriorates by the time the story gets to that point. The first half is filled with regular commercial aspects like love, friendship, loyalty and betrayal… making the hero gutsy to finally step inside the cursed sea. Despite a few potential stretches, sandwiching literally hundreds of plot points makes it confusing and we get to detach from the flow. There is a backstory that takes place in the 1980s timeline, small stuff that could have been conveyed crisply at one go, but it consumes almost thirty minutes of the runtime, that too spread across at a minimum of five different areas of the screenplay, explaining the same context again and again with minor tweaks. The sea portions are notorious, there is a unique idea of exhibiting the water full of skeletons, but there is no development beyond visually showing it in a couple of shots. The done and dusted outdated treatment is applied, by bringing a bunch of ladies with heavy white face paint just to be creepy. Followed by more uninteresting sequences that bore us out, even the sea monster creature makes no impact. There is no logic in the subject, it is fine because of the fantasy storyworld, but the heroine biting a ghost’s hand to kick it off the boat and a character narrating a flashback to the hero by floating in the middle of the ocean are unacceptable moments to digest. In addition to everything, there are lip sync issues throughout, either the dialogues are changed in the dubbing stage or the placement timing is mismatched.

Performances:

GV Prakash look set and body language suits his rugged character perfectly, with no big scope for emoting, he was a fine fit for the role. Divyabharathi does not have much to do, just a couple of filler scenes in the first half and the interesting arc in her role was not utilized well in the latter. The supporting actors who played as the hero's friends had enough screen space, but none of them had anything special to elevate the drama. Chetan, Azhagam Perumal and Elango Kumaravel had their contribution to the story, but their character establishments and the way their scenes were presented are underwhelming.

Technicalities:

GV Prakash offers nothing great both in terms of music, the song tracks are quite unimpressive and the background score lacks to build the tension. Gokul Benoy’s camerawork is decent, the switching aspect ratios for different timelines is a good idea, but the world needed more creativity. San Lokesh’s editing is probably the worst part of the film, every aspect of his work pulls down the output and makes it overly clumsy. Appreciable production design by SS Moorthy who has been a pillar for many medium budget flicks, the making appears to be convincing because of his skillful execution. VFX lacks finesse that make the movie visually inconsistent.

Bottomline

The simplistic backstory has nonsensical detailing, setup is weak due to the rushed present portions with overstuffing the content and the sea adventure sequences have no fizz to gain force. Both the halves are equally bad and boring.

Rating - 2/ 5