Iru Mugan (2016) Movie Drinking Game
Down a Shot: each time something illogical happens
Down a Shot: each time Love acts all clever but ends up being the most harebrained villain ever!
Down a Shot: for every time you see an inhaler onscreen.
By: Vidal D’costa (Five Beers) –
A suspended RAW agent, Akhilan, and his handler Aayushi are tasked with foiling the masterplan of a campy villain named Love who is hellbent on ruling the world with the help of inhalers containing a toxic drug called Speed which grants its users with instant 5 minute super strength. Akhilan also uses this mission to his advantage to avenge the death of a loved one, but along the way, some harsh truths will be revealed to him….
A Toast
Nithya Menon and Nayanthara look glamorous and get to be pretty bad-arse in this movie as Aayushi the RAW agent handler and Meera the hacker respectively, whenever they get enough screen time, of course. Usually commercial potboilers only utilise female actors as eye candy and this was a nice change from the usual formulaic role. And at least, there’s no damsel in distress trope, either. Phew!
Some action sequences such as the one where the villain Love takes on the cops after escaping from a jail cell and mocks an agent as she is drawing her last breath were very sleek and engaging yet also disturbing to watch.
There are also some wickedly silly and funny moments in the first half involving Akhilan’s interactions with a bumbling Malaysian police officer which are quite memorable, but these are too few and far between.
The concept, too, held promise and the second half serves up some great scenes between Nayanthara and Vikram’s characters as a spy couple who are on the run from the police and have to work together using their respective skills. Carrying out ‘hacker stuff’ in the front seat of a car while your husband drives like some kind of a deranged speed racer… It’s not an easy job, folks!
Beer Two
Apart from being rather campy and snarky and occasionally flirtatious with Akhilan (all qualities I quite liked in the character), the villain Love also can be very dumb, getting caught red-handed time and again by our protagonists despite a penchant for acting all clever and cunning and utilising high tech gadgets and even body doubles… Only for Akhilan and Ayushi to come bursting into their hideout seconds later! Love only leaves a mark during the aforementioned torture scene involving an injured agent with a jugular vein wound.
Love is basically Jeffree Starr if Jeffree considered a career in torturing enemies with poisonous cosmetics and selling inhalers with adrenaline pumping drugs in them instead of creating make-up tutorials for a teen demographic. Considering that I was rather excited to see Chiyaan Vikram take up a role where he played up his eccentricities to a max, this performance just wasn’t as memorable as his earlier similar stints such as metrosexual to the core Ramp-walk Remo in Anniyan/Aparichit (who could easily pass off as a long lost sibling to Love in an alternate universe, by the way). In his dual role as Akhilan the action hero, he is even more forgettable.
And I hate the fact that I had to write the aforementioned paragraphs because Vikram is otherwise a talented actor with a lot to offer when given a tighter script. It just sucks that he’s under-utilised in commercial potboilers with weak writing and weaker characterisation such as this.
Beer Three
The script has so many plot holes in it, you could easily use it as a colander and be done with it. Just one example of a glaring plot hole is the clichéd Lazarus pit approach to resurrecting a character midway through a movie that has been done to death in shows like Arrow but in this movie it’s even more illogical, half-baked, and stupidly executed. There’s this scene in Mani Ratnam’s Raavanan wherein Vikram’s character is shot multiple times by a whole army of coppers and then he falls down a deep ravine. He ends up dead obviously (sorry, spoilers). There’s a similar scene in this movie where Vikram’s character’s wife also gets shot right through the head by a sniper and she too falls down a deep ravine but somehow ends up alive. Yeah, someone explain that logic to me. It was probably at this point I decided I wasn’t going to take this movie seriously. There is no way in hell I’m ready to suspend my disbelief that much, dear screenwriter!
Beer Four
As if to distract from the lack of a coherent plot and other illogical stuff happening in this movie, there are also three (count ’em, three) lengthy dance sequences that weigh down the pace of this thriller, almost turning it into a sappy and corny romance.
Beer Five
Whenever I watch action sequences in action-heavy Indian movies such as the quirky superhero flick Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota or other South Indian flicks such as Raavanan, David, Aparichit (a lot of these are Vikram starrers too), etc, I’m blown away by the effort put in to make them nail biting, engaging, and even realistic, but here the stunts are generic and lacklustre and you wonder what would have been the outcome if a more innovative stunt coordinator had been at the helm. Maybe Vikram wouldn’t have looked like he was sleepwalking through most of them.
Verdict
A pretty run of the mill, predictable sci-fi thriller with nothing new to offer other than two Vikrams. Make sure to switch your brains off if you do intend on watching this one.
