REVOLVER RITA Review - Atrocities Assemble!

Ashwin Ram

Writing/ Direction: The arc of the story is something similar to Kolamaavu Kokila, an innocent family is caught in a chaotic crime world. As the film has its own problems, reminding other movies from the same genre did not feel like much of a concern. As if there is a rule book, of late all the dark comedy flicks follow a similar pattern with exaggerated situations, loud performances, weird look-set for the artists, etc… everything is applicable here and there is no sign of refreshment in the treatment as well. Very poor casting choices at first place, moreover the blame is for the director to own as he has extracted such unpleasant acting from the artists in the name of fun. No place for emotions here, there are barely any efforts taken for the viewers to root for the so-called innocent family of ladies. Such a carelessly written screenplay where nothing feels coherent and there are plenty of loose ends with respect to abrupt character discontinuations. The next step is pre-determined and a new character is introduced in literally every scene just to move the plot forward to the already assigned area. Repetitive foreshadowing is one of the major spoilsports, mentioning about the younger sister’s NEET exam for example. Just to register the story is taking place in Pondicherry, all the area names are continuously being uttered by someone or the other, maybe to promote tourism in the town. The fun part falls flat in totality as they are penned in a lethargic manner… immediately after a character delivers a dialogue, a different person in the scene tweaks the words from the previous sentence. Even after revealing the easily predictable twist, the film is stretched to a huge extent by playing on and on with the reward money angle in rotations. The final stretch has a couple of genuinely appreciable moments, the mosquito spray idea and a solid clap-worthy timing counter by Radhika Sarathkumar at the end, one can only wish for such enjoyments at regular intervals.

Performances: Sort of a performance oriented film where the artist’s body language, timing reactions and dialogue delivery have to be in sync to work out and these factors are mostly a miss here. Keerthy Suresh’s expressions are a mixed bag, held well in some subtle portions but otherwise it tends to be ineffective. Surprisingly Radhika Sarathkumar has missed to crack the meter here, disappointing outing for someone experienced like her who generally hits every ball out of the park. Way too many characters and it is nagging that many are unwanted to the subject, brought in just for the intended flavour. Horrendous presence by most actors such as Suresh Chakravarthy, John Vijay, Redin Kingsley, etc. Such a dummy role for Telugu actor Sunil, he just stood still and stared at everyone like a caricature. Ajay Ghosh is probably the only one who got his quirks right, but that too was overly done after a point.

Technicalities: One of the lacklustre albums from Sean Roldan in recent times, the montage songs did not highlight any aspect of the film. The background score is underwhelming too, music is fine but the tunes are mismatched as they felt like separate tracks without blending with the situations. Cinematography is on the satisfactory range as it seems fine from a layman perspective, but the film’s mood needed an unique colour palette which was missing throughout, also plenty of potential shots wasted with badly staged buildup compositions. Editing is a blunder here, the links are not organic with the lag-max 142 minutes runtime feeling like a whole day, also some empty shots are randomly placed which might be a quality-check error.

Verdict: A dark humour flick that tries hard to tick all the routine formulas of the genre, but with barely any comedies. In fact the outcome fluctuates between crashing boredom and an irritable affair.

REVOLVER RITA - Atrocities-Assemble!

Rating - 1.75/ 5.