Captain Movie Review: By now, any self-respecting movie buff knows what to expect from a Shakti Soundar Rajan film. The director has made a career out of desi-fying Hollywood genre fare, one film at a time. So, after his attempts at making heist movie, a pet comedy, a zombie thriller, a sci-fi thriller, and a fantasy buddy comedy, the filmmaker goes after the creature feature genre with Captain. His sources this time are the Predator and movies of its ilk, including the sequels, Doom and Riddick.
But the problem this time is that the film actually feels like something shot with a basic plot outline instead of a complete script. Captain Vetri Selvan, for whom his team is family, is tasked with going into an unoccupied forest area and uncovering the mystery behind the unexplainable deaths of the previous teams that had gone on a recce to the area. Can he succeed in this dangerous mission?
Even if his films are derivate, until now, Shakti Soundar Rajan managed to give us one central relationship that served as an emotional hook for us to stay invested in the proceedings. But here, all we get are one-note characters and a bland set-up that includes a half-hearted stab at building a romantic track. These portions are so perfunctory – introduce the protagonist and his world, have a song to show the camaraderie between the hero and his team introduce the conflict, add a mandatory romance – that they barely do anything for us. Even the bits involving the creature, which the film describes as a minotaur, are sketchy. Some scientic mumbo jumbo, like bio radio signals, and a bit of eco messaging. It’s all so uninvolving that we hardly care for the survival of the characters. We get a dubious scientist character, played by Simran, and the director resorts to an archaic idea – an ambitious woman who is OK with sleeping with someone to succeed in her goal – to establish this character.
But with the writing hardly giving them anything to play with, the actors all perform in clueless fashion. Beyond earnestness, Arya hardly displays any emotion, and it is hard to believe that it is the same actor who we had seen in Sarpatta Parambarai. Despite the grey shades in her character, Simran, too, comes across as a cardboard cutout. The less said about Aishwarya Lekshmi’s character the better, for all it does is make us wonder how the actress, who picks up very interesting films in Malayalam, said okay to this role!.
Even the creature – the one reason to checkout the film – is underwhelming. It looks like a cheap knock-off of the Predator in appearance, and does things that an unintelligent villain does, including not killing it’s biggest threat – the hero – when it has the chance. The same can be said of the film, too – an underwhelming, underwritten action movie.
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