Doctor(Netflix)
Directed by Nelson Dilipkumar
Rating: **
After the glowing reviews which made it seem like some kind of a comic historical occurrence, Doctor is a bit of a letdown.
No,make that a big letdown. It is more cocky than comic, more arrogant in its potshots at traditional comic conventions than the presentation warrants. Sivakarthikeyan who also produces this weird homage to the art of absurdist humour ,plays a deadpan doctor(if Arjun Reddy was dull instead of drugged…) who doesn’t seem to have any sense of romance . His girlfriend Padmini(Priyanka Arul Mohan) wants to call off their engagement: who wants to marry a guy who recommends medicines when the girl needs TLC?
For me, there was only one LOL episode in what stand-up comedians generally refer to as ‘bakchodi’: unnecessary and cheesy conversation on issues that are neither easily soluble nor open to discussion. The funny moment is when Padmini’s mother-in-law-to-be flatly tells her she doesn’t like her.
“Same here,” Padmini shoots back.
Now where does human trafficking come into the picture? You may well ask. The plot doesn’t think twice before gamboling from one null situational comedy episode to another in a robotic rhythm.
Robotic reminds me of the lead actor Sivakarthikeyan. One admiring critic has noted that the actor doesn’t smile even once in the film. As if that is a sign of good acting! For the record he does smile once. Also, for the record, I didn’t smile even once. I saw nothing remotely funny in Sivakarthikeyan’s doctor-turns-detective-turns-antitrafficker act. It is huge leap of faith.And the script, which is on its own trip, is of no help to Sivakarthikeyan.
The ‘humour’if one may consider the exceeding absurdity of the script as potentially funny, is founded almost entirely on the hero keeping a straight face while the world around him falls apart. Varun’s fiancee’s niece is kidnapped by a trafficking gang.The cops are no help. They never are. Not in the movies. A crass cop on-duty tells the distressed family how low the chances are of finding the girl.
Varun , smarter than he looks and twice as annoying than he seems, takes it on himself to locate the kidnapped girl Chinnu(Zaara Vineet). In the search that follows he is accompanied by characters who are meant to grate on our nerves,since tripping over your nose to spite your face is a funny sport in the film. To be more literal and less metaphorical, the chosen sport is, slapping your opponent’s hand until it becomes a lifeless limb.
Specially unbearable among the characters is a middleaged busybody named Preethi , played by Deepa Shankar(who definitely expects some awards for her performance). Preethi likes to plonk herself into the middle of every conversation. Too bad she has nothing even remotely intelligent to say.
The film suffers from the same misconceived I-know-what-I-am-doing-is-damn-cool syndrome. It thinks its deadpan humour is the best thing to happen to Tamil cinema since Yogi Babu, when it is clearly not. It layers the oafish kidnapping story with the kind of laughs that Kundan Shah generated in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. But you can’t apply the narrative device of a political satire to a find-the-missing-child drama.
Survivalist dramas survive only when served up at the right temperature. Doctor is over-heated under-cooked. For long passages the villains which include real-life twins Raghu Ram and Rajiv Laxman playing Melvin and Alvin(no end to the ingenuity of this script, I tell you) form a lumbering labyrinth of evil leading to the kidnapped girl.
The girl is saved. But who will rescue this cheerless comedy trying hard to intellectualize inanity by dressing up the droll in the emperor’s clothes?