‘Mafia: Chapter 1’ review- It has a pretty smart ending. The rest of the film is a different story.
Endings are almost always what justify stories.
And ‘Mafia: Chapter 1’ the much anticipated movie by Karthick Naren has a surprise ending that you would never see coming.
And the way the director- who also wrote the script- logically connects the ending to a scene that happens in the first half of the film(and which looked like just a throwaway scene at that time) is interesting.
Unfortunately, the ending doesn’t make the movie all that good. And it certainly doesn’t justify the slog of a pace in which the rest of the movie plays out.
The problem is that the ending doesn’t inform much of what preceded it. Instead, it’s meant purely as a set up for the second chapter which the title of this movie hints at.
As for the first chapter, it’s all about Arya(Arun Vijay)- a Narcotics Bureau Officer trying to take down Diwakar Kumar(Prasanna) who is the mastermind behind the entire drug trade in Tamil Nadu.
Naren’s first film ‘Dhruvangal Pathirnaaru’(2016) is also the only movie of his to have hit the screens before this. (His sophormore attempt, ‘Narakasuran’ seems to be stuck in some legal dispute, and hasn’t been released so far.)
That movie- which again was penned by Naren- was and remains one of the most best written crime thrillers in Tamil movie in recent times.
Not only did Naren show a terrific command over both writing and visual narration, the psychological underpinnings of the characters had a depth that hinted at a writer with unusual strength.
No such strength is seen in the writing of ‘Mafia: Chapter-1.’
Diwakar is set up as a mystery person whom no one can seem to identify let alone catch. But then, in the span of just a few minutes, we not just come to know his identity but also learn he likes to wear wildly colorful shirts with a tropical theme and hangs out at interestingly lit night clubs.
As for the action sequences, they seem more like preludes to action scenes than anything. In fact, the central problem of the film seems to be its indecision between being an action flick and an investigative thriller.
For my money, I would have gone with the action film route.
Instead of telling the story like it’s an intelligent thriller(which it most certainly isn’t), maybe the director could have leaned more into the action aesthetics and gone for a hyper-realistic style of delivery. (God only knows Jakes Bejoy’s savvy soundtrack was built for it.)
Naren does take the approach with some action scenes but the effort feels only half-hearted at best.
Naren’s talent as a director does come through in some scenes(like when Diwakar first comes face to face with Arya, when Diwakar’s first glimpse of the latter is a shadow on a wall awash in neon light.)
But such instances are too rare in a film that could have done with better writing and direction.
Arun Vijay’s ‘I-just-have-only-one-expression-and-that’s-my-bulldog-expression’ mode of acting doesn’t help either.Though, to be fair he is rarely given a scene which demands much else.
If there’s a Chapter 2, here’s to hoping that the writer/director and his lead actor would invest a little more of their talent(which they are both blessed with) for the sake of a better film.
‘Mafia: Chapter-1’ compares its own world to a jungle where a lion(hero) and a fox(villain) face off. It unfortunately feels like a forest not worth exploring.
