Premise: Ajay Dhishan and Dhanusha broke up due to a heated argument after being in a relationship for six years. They realise they have still not mentally come out from the heartbreak even after a year, how do they deal with it forms the remaining story.

Writing/ Direction: The film does not follow the regular template, as the opening scene showcases the lead pair’s breakup, the follow-ups are only how they handle the tough situations and not any flashback of sorts. But still, it is a very problematic flick with a regressive ideology of it is difficult to overcome breakups and move on. The making is lazy in every aspect, taking the audiences for granted from the start till the end. It felt like watching Instagram reels and YouTube shorts on the big screen. Random Gen-Z terms are used as dialogues throughout, just for the sake of it without any context. The direction is extremely amateurish, we get to witness monotonous moments every minute in one way or the other. Plenty of AI shots with such poor quality have been used in regular intervals, a shot from Vijay Antony starrer Saithaan takes place for no reason as well. STR public speech videos are used in several places, just for a motivational drive, with better timing and purpose, the idea ends up as a commercial tool and sadly the result backfires. The screenplay is patience-testing with zero redeeming qualities, the gym and spiritual portions in the first half, the matchmaking sequences in the latter are all complete annoyances. All the intended jokes misfire and tend to irritate the viewers, on the flip side the emotional areas become laughing stocks.

Performances: Ajay Dhishan struggles to perform, his body language is very single-dimensional. Guy also suffers with his dialogue delivery and modulation. RK Dhanusha is comparatively better in terms of acting, but with pathetically written situations, no legendary actor can save this film. Pandiyarajan’s character arc in the last reel tries to give a small redemption, but the terrible ending pulls it to the bottom. Vivek Prasanna and Poobalam Pragatheeswaran are mere caricatures, their jokes are repetitive and they exist only to listen to the hero’s story.

Technicalities: The film is already bad as it is, Vijay Antony’s outdated music has only worsened the output. He has treated it like a musical, no issues but the background score is fully vocal with him uttering nonsense that too in bizarre modulations. If a word is in the dialogue or text form, the same is used as a mini soundtrack and this happens at least once in every five minutes. Low production quality and it evidently reflects in the visuals, the camera work is already very basic, and on top of that the convenient AI, tacky VFX shots and recorded videos make the look of the entire movie very cheap. Vijay Antony has cooked Kotthu Parotta at the edit table with all the shots he has received, zero coherence and barely any attempt to convey a story with the vital craft.

Verdict: There is a lyric phrase in the film that goes like, ‘Pookie-kum pookie-kum sandai, sandai la odaiyudhu mandai’. The pookies are the two lead characters in the movie and we, the viewers, end up breaking our heads while watching their nonsense.

POOKIE - Horrendously made amateurish and regressive rom-com!

Rating - 1/ 5.