Captain Miller(Now Streaming On Amazon Prime Video)
Starring Dhanush , Shiva Rajkumar, Priyanka Arul Mohan, Aditi Balan, Sundeep Kishan, Edward Sonnenblick ,John Kokken
Directed by Arun Matheswaran
Rating: ** ½
Dhanush’s latest film is so self-promotional it can be rechristened ‘Captain Of A Sinking Ship.’ Captain Miller is the Titanic of Tamil cinema. It aims at being epic, but ends up as a sorry mess with an inflated sense of selfworth and a soundtrack sounds more rusted than rustic..more like remnants and leftovers from a Hollywood potboiler .
Set in the British Raj, Captain Miller tells us that the Britishers could rule over India because the populace was habituated to being dominated.Hence on one hand there is the Indian dynastic ruler Rajadhipathi(Jayaprakash) wielding the whip. On the other hand there is the tyrannical British Governor’s sadistic son Riley(Alexx O’Neil) who grimaces and slaughters Indians with a relish of a famished traveller attacking a plate of biryani.
An aside: there was a time when Tom Alter was the choice by default for all British Raj villains. Now it’s Alex. Best of luck with that.
Beetween the two extremities of violence and torture, Dhanush’s Easa stands tall with megalomaniacal majesty. The entire project seems to be a pretext for Dhanush to flaunt his skills as an actor, so much so that the other characters , appear in a blurry blizzard rushing in and out only to amplify and enhance Easa, a.k.a Captain Miller as a messiah risen from ashes as the saviour of the tortured masses.
There is a small but memorable cameo by an unknown actor named Abdool Lee who loses his mind while killing his own people on the Britishers’s order.
Wish someone would save us the tortured masses from the excesses committed by this film which seems to have a message for all prospective saviours of humanity: go for it with hammers and tongs.
The bloodsoaked narrative moves forward like a drunken sumo wrestler, knocking down all rhyme and reason senseless.There is this big fight between Easa and Riley where Easa mumbles in broken English that the woman whom he loves has asked him to kill Riley, and then shoots him in the head.
A few minutes later Riley is back with bleeding bandages around his face.
It’s not only Riley who is invincible in this project. The film, I hear, will have two more avatars . God save us all! As for the British Raj, one doesn’t know of the full extent of its impact. But yes, if such atrociously selfimportant cinema is one of their legacies then they were indeed the villains that they are portrayed to be in our cinema.