The highly anticipated multilingual Indian film, ‘Jagame Thandhiram’ dropped on Netflix yesterday… and it was kinda meh. Sure, there were some good visuals, decent editing and alongside Dhanush’s brilliant performance – this movie manages to be watchable. Okay, maybe that was a bit too harsh. The first half is entertaining with epic dialogue and tight cuts. And surprisingly James Cosmo is fun to watch (Well not so surprising, if you think about it). But the movie managed to be slow paced at times (in an action film), with the second half of the film being overly convoluted. But what took the cake was ‘Jagame Thandhiram’s’ writer-director, Karthik Subbaraj’s treatment of Joju George’s character, Sivadoss. Simply put, Joju George was wasted in this movie.
Karthik Subbaraj is known for his brilliant films ‘Pizza’ and ‘Jiggarthanda’. And we think that he is better than this semi-clusterfuck that is available for streaming on Netflix. But the character of Sivadoss didn’t have the nuance that Joju George was known for having in his movies (which Karthik’s writing didn’t account for). Joju could have been replaced with any other actor and the impact of his role within the film wouldn’t change. Look, there is a lot to unpack in this movie, with it managing to mess around with themes of racism and immigration. Kudos for being brave enough to experiment, but that part of the film still felt quite flat. And we would talk about that part too, but we still can’t get past our Joju George hang-up at the moment.
Joju George is a Malayalam actor who became prominent in the last couple of years with his brilliant film, ‘Joseph’. The actor has then gone on to play a lot of character roles and he has shown that he really excels in portraying such characters. For an actor like that to play this role, is frankly quite sad. Of course, we understand that Joju is building his pan-Indian fanbase and a film written and directed by Karthik Subbaraj with an immense budget, starring Indian superstar Dhanush was too good an opportunity to pass up. But the actor had become so selective with his roles and then to throw his selectiveness away for a more varied audience is slightly disheartening.
Maybe the actor saw something in the role that the rest of us couldn’t see, but for many of us, everything decent about Joju’s character in the movie came much later, when the character was not on screen. And when we mean decent, we meant character depth, the complexity which he did not get to perform on screen, but had to be heard about, through dialogue.
Now, we can cut them some slack. This movie was obviously meant to be a theatrical release, especially with the way some of the film’s pivotal scenes are shot. The Netflix release has definitely impacted the movie negatively, with the action sequences being more “show-boaty” and dialogues ending up a little “try-hard”. For a Karthik Subbaraj film, it was not as good as we wanted it to be.
If interested, check out ‘Jagame Thandhiram’ on Netflix. It is available for streaming in 17 languages.
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