Thakka Thakka is a rather crafty film. It’s the film equivalent of an empty but exquisitely carved jewellery box. It’s beautiful and promising from the outside. The scenes — especially the ones at night — are dramatically shot (by Sujith Sarang); the editing is crisp and doesn’t let even a single shot outstay its worth. It even has a Bala-film-like beginning when a small girl is forced to become a sex worker and ends up giving birth to a stillborn child. The baby boy gets buried by the evil henchmen guarding the Mattancherry brothel, and the mother naturally is distraught. She cries and howls and runs towards the buried baby in slow-motion. She throws away mounds of mud and picks up the dead baby and cries a bit more (you see why I mentioned Bala). And then, the baby wails in response. A boy resurrected from death, who as you shortly realise in a quick transition, is Sathya (Vikranth), the hero - now, a fast food employee. It all happens very fast, and effectively so.
And then, you open the jewellery box. For such a dramatic introduction, Sathya almost ends up becoming a side character, as you’re introduced to his longtime friend (Arvinnd Singh) and his romance with the only daughter (Abhinaya) of an evil, single mother (Uma Padmanabhan). All this happens amid a councillor election that’s contested by a criminal/political aspirant, Parama (Rahul Venkat with a single menacing expression that he carries throughout the film). Due to the rather promising beginning, I even forgave the film its mandatory opening song about the virtue of friendship and alcohol. You can think of it as my shaking the jewellery box but finding no movement inside. I don’t know for sure, but I’m starting to feel suspicious.
And then the film put all my suspicion to rest when it introduced its main conflict and exposed its true colours. The chief problem of the story, as you dimly realise, is how a thug — the evil mom’s brother (in Tamil parlance, Thaaimaaman) — wants the same girl that Sathya’s friend is in love with. For a film that touches on political aspiration and sexual slavery, this archaic idea is such a letdown. The bubble burst at this point.
Plop! No jewellery inside this box.
And then, there’s a small ‘twist’ at the end that doesn’t quite matter. There are a couple of songs somewhere in between. There’s even the sacrifice in a friendship that you don’t really care about on account of how little time is invested in establishing it.
And not to forget, there’s much, much fighting (to perhaps justify the title) when Sathya suddenly unleashes all his until-then-for-some-reason-hidden expertise in martial arts on a bunch of hapless thugs. All the fighting happens inside a warehouse-set in Binny Mills, and when Sathya picks up different types of iron tools to reduce his enemies to a bloody heap, I was momentarily reminded of all those WWE matches when the wrestlers get under the stage and come out with innovative weapons in curious shapes. By this time, I was just going through the motions with mild interest; all that initial promise becoming a distant memory. Thakka Thakka ’s predictable, wafer-thin plot actually makes even WWE storylines seem like meritorious literary work in comparison.