Premise: Mathiyazhagan in his childhood saves a baby elephant which is struggling to climb up from a pit. They both become inseparable after the incident. Several years later, the elephant gets kidnapped and how they reunite back is the journey of the movie.

Writing/ Direction: The meeting point of the protagonist and the elephant is good. A boy who is having a tough time at home due to his toxic parents, and his fellow classmates are avoiding him for the same reason. An orphan elephant on the other hand which fell in a hole, and is unable to get on its feet. The kindness is mutual as the elephant gets a helping hand and the boy earns a friendly companion in return. But nothing falls in place after the instant spark, their bonding is nowhere to be felt with a touching scene or so. The hero keeps kissing the elephant throughout the film in the name of showering love, they even cross limits by sharing a single ice candy which is shot in a disgusting manner. It literally felt like the hero was trying to make-out with the elephant. The conflict of the film is when certain politicians pick the elephant for sacrifice as per astrology to win in the upcoming elections. In between, there is a completely irrelevant track of a cruel man who kidnaps the elephant and makes money out of it, they could have just cut to the chase showing the politician’s sidekicks kidnapped the elephant from the hero and saved some time. The message tried to convey against animal sacrifice is valid, but the movie is never faithful to its intention. The politicians keep sending the cops to capture the elephant and it just thrashes them all with some circus level stunts. There are plenty of serious scenes in the film that land as mere spoof materials, the elephant’s nickname is Indian Picasso as it has painting skills, there are full-fledged heroic fights for the elephant with slow-motion shots and background music for elevation. A chase sequence where the animal hides behind a smaller stone, but even then the cops miss their shooting target, before that the Policemen have a serious conversation with the animal about it passing in the NEET exams following the buildup the hero gave about its knowledge. Arjun Das appears in a predictable villainic role, and there are portions of sound engineer characters who are conveniently placed in the forest just for them to evidently prove that Arjun Das is a bad guy. There is an irritating friend character travelling throughout the film, nothing can be more lame than the conversations between him and the hero. The friend is like ‘Let the bad guys come, we’ll use the elephants to crush them into pieces’, for which the hero sincerely replies ‘No buddy, we’ll use the elephant to make chutneys out of the bad guys’. Such amateurish dialogues in the name of fun and there is not even a single comedy that clicks. As it is the screenplay is a crashing bore and there are no redeeming qualities, moreover Prabhu Solomon’s outdated directorial skills make it feel like an age-old film to watch. Ends notoriously too, the hero suddenly takes out a mouth organ out of nowhere and the elephant wakes up from its fainted condition, followed by a lengthy action block for the animal where it smashes all the politicians.

Performances: Weak performances from everybody, debutant Mathiyazhagan has struggled to show any sort of expression, his physical strain is nowhere evident as there are no such scenes, guess he just casually stepped in with zero homework. Many new artists and they have all put up a bad show. Arjun Das fits well with his macho look, but his characterization is weakly written for him to sparkle. So as the other established actors, dummy roles for all and infact Hareesh Peradi has gotten multiple mockery worthy situations.

Technicalities: Except for a couple decent songs from Nivas K.Prasanna, but nowhere near the gold standard music album of Kumki by D.Imman. Full-on stock background score here, whatever template sounds we have heard over the years for comic, sentiment, action, etc situations are simply implemented here. Fantastic aerial shots for the opening stretch, sadly not even a single quality frame after that. Yes the poor production quality does go for a toss with respect to the worst looking green-mat shots. Why go so far to the aesthetics, a proven cameraman like M.Sukumar has miserably failed to capture even the simple human conversations and the potential forest locality in a bare minimum decent manner. Carelessly edited with plenty of abrupt cuts and the continuity issues galore.

Verdict: Seems like director Prabhu Solomon has been trapped in the forest regions for so long now and he has indeed run out of ideas. The pointless writing does no justice for the potential content with every aspect failing to attain even the basic expectations.

KUMKI 2 - Tiresome Watch and a Disgraceful Successor!

Rating - 1.5/ 5