The Government better take immediate steps to solve the farmers’ crisis in the country. If it doesn’t, chances are Tamil cinema will make a hundred more films on it, and we, the audience, will be forced to sit through them.
The minute Gorilla, which positioned itself as a comical heist film, goes all serious and takes on a serious issue, it dives downwards to a depth from which it struggles to recover. The story revolves around Jeeva (Jiiva) and his group of friends (which includes a chimpanzee) who plan to rob a bank to solve their financial issues. They have a friend to help them out in this task – a chimpanzee (Kong) that they once saved from a forest (told through CG in the opening credits).
The group thinks that watching heist English films is enough to gather material to rob a bank. They choose a bank near Vandalur (I wondered if Kong would wander into the zoological park nearby), and break in wearing gorilla masks and take the customers hostage.
- Genre: Thriller
- Cast: Jiiva, Satish, Shalini Pandey, Radha Ravi
- Storyline: Four friends plan to rob a bank, but things change unexpectedly
All this happens after a good half hour of dialogues has been passed off as comedy, a love track that has no flavour; Arjun Reddy fame Shalini Pandey debuts in a full-fledged role in Tamil, and has very little to do here. Even all this pointless fare is excusable, but not the way Gorilla starts taking itself too seriously and launches into a discourse on the importance of farmers to the Indian economy.
The laziness in the writing of Gorilla shows. Not only did director Don Sandy and team forget to weave an engaging screenplay over a one-liner that could have actually resulted in a comedy of errors, they also seem to have shown the least interest in perking up the bank sequences. Some things are irreverent – in a good way – like the room that the four reside in (it has pictures of directors Sundar C and Venkat Prabhu!). Yogi Babu shows up in a couple of scenes as a small-time thief and tries to liven up things, but Gorilla left us feeling a bit like we were caught in the cage that the animal was found in.
