Premise: Kavin is a smart and money-minded detective. Andrea runs a mafia who is responsible for distributing illegal election amounts, she hires Kavin for a risky job of finding the stolen 440 crores. The truth unveils as his investigation progresses.
Writing/ Direction: The film begins in a documentary style by visually introducing the main characters and also by orally explaining the context, director Nelson’s voiceover dialogues with the sarcastic slang make it lively. The plot is established at the very beginning, but takes a lot of time to club the intended interlink format into the script.
Too many characters with their own conflicts are presented in isolated blocks, making it hard to absorb and diluting the core story. The screenplay struggles early on, with random mini-moments, scattered structure, sudden scene shifts, and poorly placed songs. The storytelling lacks clarity, with key details—like Andrea’s prison backstory—rushed through.
After all the fillers in the name of setup, the story finally picks up with a solid pre-interval sequence. The 10-minute department store stretch within the heist theme is good fun followed by a commercially viable midpoint. There is a sense of calmness in the second half which makes the narrative better. The scenes involving the cat and mouse game between Kavin and Andrea turned interesting as the emotional blackmail factor works with an prostitution angle.
Some interesting staging techniques are utilized efficiently in the dialogue form, but gets repetitive with the back and forth data collection from both parties. The reason for the heist is valid, but the flashback has no impactful writing.
The climax twist is a pleasant surprise, the scene extracted from the idea is clap-worthy and appeals to be a bonafide theatrical moment. Plenty of logical errors, stronger purpose was required as to why a big shot like Andrea is dependent on a petty detective like Kavin to find the thieves and retrieve such a huge sum of cash from them, also why is she longing for a different identity when her public image is a social reformer.
At the same time, there are some innovative ideas like the operation of the election money distribution network.
Performances: Kavin is a confident actor and he proves it yet again, accolades to his focused performance but his stubborn on-screen attitude is becoming a template now. Andrea Jeremiah puts up a good show as an evil selfish lady, there is a scene highlighting her criminal background but the character needed more depth to be a stronger opposition. Ruhani Sharma plays the hero’s love interest, except for one minor connecting factor, her existence is irrelevant to the film and her portions don't look like they were organically added in the script. Likewise, there are multiple characters like Redin Kingsley, VJ Archana, the actor who plays Kavin’s father, etc become a small tool at one point, but it seemed like their scenes were forcefully placed by keeping just that one moment in mind.
Technicalities: The film is a mixed bag with respect to technical aspects. There is some nice variety in music, Kannumuzhi song stands and GV Prakash’s background score uplifts the momentum of the situations, with an exciting mix of thrills with quirkiness in the Nelson zone. First class camera work by the highly experienced RD Rajasekhar, right from the visual quality to colour tone consistency, he has got everything right from his end.
Worst editing for a Tamil film in recent times with random scene orders, abrupt transitions and jump cuts, a venture that might have landed as a satisfying outing is ruined at the edit table. Sound mixing issues are evident in multiple places, voiceovers are placed on top of the ongoing dialogues and music is playing above all.
Verdict: The film has really some creative ideas and engaging stretches its almost travels in the Director Shankar style subject,but the clumsy editing spoils it making it more complicated, a simplistic storytelling might made it more solid. Nevertheless works as a passable entertainer.
MASK - A Passable Entertainer !