kaalidas 2 Review - A lazy thriller with a ridiculous crime angle!
Ashwin Ram
Premise: During the New Year’s Eve function, mysteriously a girl baby goes missing in an apartment. Bharath and Bhavani Sre are the police officers who have been appointed to solve the case. How they crack the criminal forms the crux of the story.
Writing/ Direction: Usually in whodunit movies, either the crime or the criminal will be a mystery, here at the beginning especially, the happenings are too haphazard to grasp even what is going on at the first place. The flow settles only when a clear-cut incident takes place in an apartment. After which the progression is somewhat better till the interval, watchable to an extent to say the least with the routine police procedural. Usual investigative story template is applied, focusing on a character to cheat the audience and untying the knots one by one. But the filmmaking is very amateurish here, right from the dialogues penned, performances extracted and how the characters are made to behave, etc. There are absolutely no surprises from the start, moreover the screenplay becomes too straightforward after the post interval reveal. The artists are big in numbers, there are plenty of subplots as well, but all for nothing. In the sense the buildup and staging is fine, but only if the content speaks, the payoff will be efficient. Here the story is utterly nonsense, the crime and the justification around it is so basic and in fact silly in the way it is composed. Everything feels lazy about the movie, of course the pacing and making, but even the way the characters think and react are so careless. Poor writing all over the place, usually specific viewers will be so keen to predict the happening from a crime story, here the reasoning is so random that no one can guess what is in the store.
Performances: Subtle act by Bharath without exceeding anything. On the other hand Bhavani Sre is over expressive, her dominating attitude and loud dialogue delivery is irritating at times. Ajay Karthi looks solid, stone-faced performance throughout that did not let out much, in fact it worked to an extent till the interval to maintain the suspense around his character. Sangita, Kishore, T.M. Karthik and Prakash Raj… all exist in dummy roles with no development while designing their characters. Rajiv Menon appears in a clueless cameo for no reason.
Technicalities: Just a montage song that didn’t fit the bill, acted as an hindrance to the flow, nothing special just as an audio form as well. Sam.C.S’ background score is somewhat better, but becomes repetitive in the due course of time, more like a stock music. Dim colour tone throughout the movie, that suits the dark genre, but certain talent show-off with respect to camera angles fails to enhance the subject. The film could have easily been within two hours, unhurried pacing never helped the film at any spot, also some purposefully confusing narrative areas just to tease the audience.
Verdict: After a messy start, the crime template kicks in to move on a passable note till halfway. Amateurish storytelling of an already pointless story, such a flat narrative that does not even attempt to gain the audience's interest, especially in the second half.
KAALIDAS 2 - A lazy thriller with a ridiculous crime angle!
Rating - 1.75/ 5.