Kee Movie : A messy tech thriller
What can you do with a click of a button? Maybe several things – "Like" on FB, "Tweet" on twitter, Post on several social media, but Kee takes a liberal take on hacking and takes you on a journey that explores less on the methods, but more around the psychological nature of it. Kee was promoted as a film primarily exploring the dark web and its implications, but the film is a mixture of lot more. Instead of sticking to a certain genre, there is comedy, romance, sentiment, friendship and of course the adverse of technology. Jiiva is back after a brief hiatus in this blender of everything, lets find out how much of an entertainer it has been,
Without exploring too much into the details like how Jiiva became such a techie or the methods he adopts, Kee gets into a free-falling mode shuttling between all commercial aspects. Kollywood's fantasy for glam and honey-trapping women never seem to fall short of amazement, as the film opens with such an act. Jiiva develops a custom-made virus – Baasha virus that has the capability to hack every phone around, and what does he use it for? Well, you got to scratch your head for sure on this one – Women, what else. RJ Balaji lends a supportive hand in terms of comedy, although most often the funniness appears too forced and doesn't blend into the storyline. While this is there, some mysterious murders; mostly accidents rock Chennai under weird circumstances. The driver is mostly someone subjected to blackmail by a psychopath (villain of course). Setting this aside the director shuttles between Jiiva’s college atrocities and Father sentiments for an hour or so, only then does the story finally takes shape.
A smartphone is a computer by itself, what Kee does is take every other electronic device in the surrounding and shows it to be hackable. At a point of the time the baddies start hacking everything, including a pacemaker; is it hackable? Well definitely not sure, but it drives home the director’s point of view. The movie defies the sentiments by itself, for Jiiva who seems to use his virus to honeytrap women has an emotional past where his friend commits suicide falling for a fake Romeo. This simply questions the man's integrity and sets wrong tone for the entire plot. That said this has nothing to do with the actor’s performance, which outshines the screenplay’s weakness every now and then. The film’s biggest assets are the individual’s performances – Jiiva’s usual colorful and playful attitude, Nikki in her usual best – outdoes her own in Maragathananayam, RJ Balaji occasionally shines, but Telegu veteran Rajendra Prasad is at his virtual best and makes a solid start in Tamil cinema for a jovial father. Whether a film on horrors of smartphone needs such father-son sentiment is another question, but is it worth it? Yes! Absolutely.
Kee could have been a far better piece of work, just like Vishal’s Irumbuthirai. However, in the means to satisfy several elements of commercial cinema it falls short way behind and fails to satisfy the audience who were looking for intelligence in terms of technology. The good takeaways are the individual performances of the cast and the terrors of technology, its consequences and so on. There is nothing much to talk about music by Vishal C, as it hardly sticks out to the screenplay. Director Kalees has a long way to go but deserves a mention for his efforts to showcase the rising issue of privacy.
Verdict: Kee is a confusing thriller that does not settle to its tech thriller genre and rather goes on trying to satisfy other commercial aspects which makes it to settle for just another average flick.
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