Chennai 2 Singapore is a non-serious attempt at making an adventure film about a first-time director’s unfruitful effort to make a film. If one has to describe this film’s sensibility, one could say that it combines that of CS Amudhan’s Tamil Padam and a Gautham Menon film, while adding a dash of comedy we have seen in films such as Guy Ritchie’s Snatch . Its problem? It is not as well done as those films.
The film’s plot is this: Harish (Gokul Anand) robs a rich producer, Michael (Shiva Keshav), with the help of Vaanambadi, his Singaporean cameraman friend (Rajesh Balachandiran), to finance his girlfriend Roshini’s (played by Anju Kurian) cancer treatment. But, let the film’s plot not fool you; the narrative is so audaciously brave. Even though the attempted comedy doesn't work as well as it should have, you can’t help applaud the effort.
- Director: Abbas Akbar
- Cast: Gokul Anand, Rajesh Balachandiran, Anju Kurian, Shiva Keshav
- Plot: A first-time filmmaker searches for a producer in Singapore and his life takes an adventurous turn
- Bottomline: Half well-done
The film piles one ‘has-been-done’ sequence after another: there is a cameraman-friend helping the Chennai boy roaming around Singapore to find a producer and make a film; there is a rich-girl-battling-cancer with whom he falls in love, interspersed with a completely incongruous robbery-and-a-kidnap plot that consistently deflects every attempt to take it seriously. It is almost as if the filmmaker Abbas Akbar actually wanted to make a funny slapstick comedy, but was forced by the producer to make a ‘love story’. Therefore, he fused his love story into a utterly audacious ‘action’ story.
Despite the film bordering on meaningless mostly, Chennai 2 Singapore feels strangely funny, even though the laughs aren’t consistent throughout the film. Especially, there is a long sequence at the end, where the baddie Michael, played in an over-the-top fashion, is forced to take Harish to the place where Roshini is kept as a hostage, with a gun shoved up his backside.
Besides the film’s at-times-enjoyable treatment, the lead actor Gokul Anand is a good find for Tamil cinema. He is good-looking and comfortable in front of the camera. Anju Kurian as Roshini does an adequate job as the girl with cancer, while Rajesh Balachandiran's performance as Vaanambadi is, once again, part weird and part funny.
Even if none of these work for you, composer Ghibran’s tunes should be enough to make you sit through this film, which, in hindsight, could have been a much better slapstick attempt.
