Gangers Movie Review : Sundar C & Vadivelu's heist comedy is not so funny and not too dull

Gangers Movie Synopsis: A team of oddball characters team up to rob Rs 100 crore black money that has been stashed in a highly secure locker by three brothers who control a small town.

Gangers Movie Review: If you had come across the promos for Gangers, you’d not be wrong in thinking that you are stepping into a laugh riot spun around a heist when you enter the theatre. But at least until the intermission, what the film makes us think is, ‘Where’s the funny?’ For, up to this point, the film unfolds as a very generic commercial potboiler about a vigilante (well, sort-of) trying to teach a lesson to evil men, set against a small-town backdrop.

A school girl goes missing (the latest in a series of mysterious disappearances), a teacher (Catherine Tresa, who plays the typical Sundar C glam doll) tries to trace her whereabouts, and a police officer gets assigned an undercover cop to the school. Sundar C operates with a bag full of commercial cinema clichés — a comedian (Vadivelu) who hopes to marry the heroine and competes with the hero (Sundar C, who plays what is more or less another version of the characters he plays in his Aranmanai films), a seemingly good character turning out to be a major villain, of course, a fair amount of bloodshed. And not surprisingly, none of these make us feel anything.

It is only in the latter half, when the film finally gets to the heist part, that we realise all that we have seen until then was just set-up. And you wonder what made the filmmaker go with such an overlong set-up.

Thankfully, things improve in the second half and we get to see some comedy that even if it does not make us laugh out loud (like the stretch involving Manobala in the director’s recent Madha Gaja Raja) makes us break into a smile. Vadivelu, who still seems to be finding his form, gives us a glimpse of the comic force that he once was, and Sundar C, too, comes up with moments that come close to the madcap comic energy that we see in his best works.

This is when we begin to feel how the film would have benefitted a lot from a tighter, more engaging set-up, less violence and seriousness of tone, and more elements involving the heist. At least in films like Aambala and Madha Gaja Raja, Sundar C was using the mass movie elements with a wink, but here, it's all played with a straight face, with full seriousness.

Coming to the heist itself, it isn’t as wacky as what we got in the underrated and often overlooked 144, another semi-rural heist comedy, but there are enough elements — Vadivelu’s numerous looks, the mini missions before the final heist, the clever use of Madha Gaja Raja — to keep us entertained, and at least make us not leave the theatre with regret.