The first half of the story opens in a school, and follows an ultra-generic commercial film template. But the second half gets a little better. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Now that Sundar C is not just a filmmaker but also a leading man, his films have changed in tonality. In Gangers, he plays a PT Master named Saravanan, and the first half plays like Nammavar transformed into an ultra-generic commercial movie. The senior students do drugs. A girl is filmed while taking a bath. A little boy falls from a height and breaks his head, and it doesn’t look like an accident. And when a young girl goes missing, the teacher played by Catherine Tresa does all she can do to find her. And slowly, Saravanan begins to set things right. He gets three big action sequences. And what do we get? Lectures. Saravanan sees that the kids in school are all barefooted. He buys them shoes. He says, “If we take care of this generation today, they will take care of us tomorrow.”
During this dull first half, audiences expecting a grand reunion of Vadivelu and Sundar C may wonder: Where are the jokes! Yes, there is a small running gag about the Vadivelu character falling for a teacher, but the laugh-factor is very low. Things get more puzzling post-interval, when we get a tragic flashback with a random love song and a pregnant woman whose stomach is impaled with the stump of a tree. And even earlier, we have been treated to the sight of a girl hanging outside a car, whose head gets bashed against a milestone by the roadside. I am not against the depiction of violence per se, but why so much suggestive gore in a movie meant to be little more than time-pass? Why are we in a template hero-versus-bad guys movie that could have featured any upcoming actor wanting to become an action star?
After about an hour and a half, we realise that this has all been the set-up for a big stretch involving a heist. And that’s when Gangers begins to come together. As a “comedy”, it’s still not very good. The jokes that work are few and far between. But once Saravanan and his gang decide to pull off the heist, the film finds its focus and it keeps moving. With better writing, this could have been a seriously good crime thriller. But because they don’t want to be serious, we are left with a not-bad final stretch, with a couple of clever ideas. For instance, those earlier action scenes aren’t just for Sundar C to flex his muscles. There’s a payoff. Of course, the writing is very basic and the film is not all that it could be. But if you set your expectations that this is not the laugh riot that the trailer made you expect, Gangers is what you’d call… sit-through-able.
