Chennai to Singapore - Fun Ride ends in a Crash-landing

The flavor of the season Ghibran is scoring brilliant music for every other release each week and this time he has doubled up as producer for a half baked kick ass fun ride by a bunch of newcomers who do impress in spite of the glaring flaws.

A young filmmaker Harish (Gokul Anand) gets cheated by a producer whom he kicks the shit out of and ends up in a mess. One of his friends packs him off to Singapore in search of a prospective producer. There after losing his passport and money he indulges in one misadventure after another with his bad luck dogging him until he finds a friend Vanambadi (Rajesh Balachandiran) and falls in love with a mysterious girl (Anju Kurien) with a misfortune of her own who might be his ticket to redemption. What follows is an alternating graph of silly high laugh out loud moments followed by abysmal plain silly that makes for a fairly entertaining couple of hours. And not to forget a whole load of life’s truths that hit you hard blurted out in the most matter of fact manner possible that raises the bar of 'Chennai to Singapore'.

Gokul Anand as Harish is highly impressive as the hero and those who see the posters and fear he might kill Tamil among other things are in for a surprise as it is your boy next door. He is natural as the aspiring film director and a debutant who can convince you comically has for sure passed the acid test by a mile. All those scenes in which he speaks and behaves earnestly while his costars or situations troll him are very well done. Gokul also has style when he jazzes up for the ‘Vaadi Vaadi’ song that pops up at a very exciting moment in the screenplay. Rajesh Balachandiran as the Singapore cameraman Vaanambadi is an absolute scream and has the potential to become a busy comedian in Kollywood with his array of minute expressions. It is he who mouths the best lines in the movie with a casualness of a pedestrian and the "If you think you are in big trouble someone else is in a much bigger one" used in many apt situations brings the house down. The progression of injuries that he sustains and his reactions to them from the time he meets the hero till the end are hilarious to say the least. Anju Kurian as Roshini looks good on the eye in the songs and scenes but does not have much to do in the screenplay. Emcee Jesz as PaapaBlast aka Checkmate the bumbling hitman is another member of the cast who evokes laughter with some of the Singaporeans playing his henchmen also joining in the fun (watch for the guy who realizes his grandpa is Chinese and the headphone sporting cook who is blissfully unaware of the chaos around him). Shiv Kesav as chief antagonist Michael though loud in his performance also manages the comedy well especially after he gets a gun treatment on his behind.

The first half of the film unfolds organically punctuated with the laughs and the philosophical lines in equal measure. The scene in which the hero cries thinking about his mother and happening upon the heroine who is also crying opens up a lot of possibilities and when they decide to write their story based on what she is crying about raises the expectations high at the interval block. The dialogues are beautifully written and much of the comedy is derived both from the lines as well as slapstick. The motif personifying the future of the hero as four masked men dressed in black appearing everytime he jeopardizes himself is a novel idea. There is a distinctive Guy Ritchie influence in the making which works for the movie to a certain extent.

On the downside all the good work in the first half becomes undone in the second which nosedives and the screenplay runs out of all the good ideas and settles for a looooooong drawn out climax action sequences which only irritates after a point. The film though set in Singapore lacks atmosphere as only the characters seem to exist in every frame with not even a sign of any others.

It is Ghibran's show all the way with all his songs clicking and needless to add that his background score is rich and carries the film through. Karthick Nallamuthu's camera work is excellent and editing by Praveen K.L is crisp in the first half. Writer-director Abbas Akbar shows a lot of promise as beneath all the humor lies a cute messages. At the same time he is also guilty of the cardinal sin of leading the audience onto a novel premise only to dive deep into mediocrity.

Verdict : Go for it to drench in Ghibran’s music, good performances and some laugh out loud moments.