The first 10 minutes of Boomerang surprisingly hits you hard. Shiva (Atharvaa) has met with a fire accident and his face is burnt. He looks like… well, remember Vikram in I ? But there’s medical help at hand, and a doctor announces that he could start afresh if he underwent a face transformation surgery. He’d get a new face then, she says. But that needs a donor. And the same hospital has a person on the verge of dying and his mother is willing to donate his face.
With his ‘new’ face, Shiva has to deal with all the battles that the person whose face he now possesses. Boomerang is a modern-day Pudhiya Mugham (remember plastic surgery?), so we think.
- Genre: Thriller
- Cast: Atharvaa, Megha Akash, RJ Balaji, Satish, Upen Patel
- Storyline: A youngster gets a different ‘face’ and has to deal with the consequences
But director Kannan has different ideas. The minute the film gets into friendship zone (Sathish has a few clever lines but is plain annoying) and cutesy-romance zone (Megha Akash as a short filmmaker seems bereft of expressions) it takes a nosedive. Halfway through the film, the director disbands the great face transplant idea – which could have been exploited and fleshed out into a better commercial film – and veers into a commentary against corporate companies and the benefits of youngsters taking to farming.
The intentions are honourable, but the angst and frustration over the system ( Aayutha Ezhuthu style…after all, the director is a former assistant of Mani Ratnam) doesn't touch an emotional chord like it wants to. A clichéd villain arrives in the end, but by then, the film has already backfired.
This kind of a subject needs a bigger star – I kept imagining the possibilities of Vijay, Ajith or Suriya in such a storyline. Atharvaa is earnest, but the distractions in what could have been a straight solid storyline are just too many in Boomerang .
