The film is centered on the romance between the characters played by Ayushmann Khurrana and Rashmika Mandanna. But this love story is not affecting, and neither are there enough scares and laughs. The film is sit-through-able, but from this franchise I expected more. That was the short take. A longer review follows and it may contain spoilers.
After Lokah, we get another vampire movie that’s part of a universe – and Thamma, too, is based on folklore. Like we learnt from the Chandamama stories, these bloodsuckers with fangs and flying powers are called “betaal” – and our first sighting of one occurs in 323 BC, when Alexander is with his troops, riding through a dense Indian jungle. Alexander refuses to believe the Indian guide who warns that a supernatural power exists. He is soon proved wrong. The problem isn’t what happens. The problem is how it happens. The scene, like the film, is predictable to a fault. The supposed scare happens just the way we expect it to, and just when we expect it to. There’s also a dash of patriotism, when a betaal asks the emperor: “Bharat pe kabzaa karega tu?” I was primed for a similar scene with the East India Company. Imagine the possibilities of a global conquest being interrupted by a haemo-global conquest. It was not to be.
At some point in all these universes, the films begin to take themselves and their world-building very seriously. They forget what fun the earlier films were. The films become bigger, with better visual effects, but they lose the goofy charm of the predecessors. That’s what happens with Thamma, directed by Aditya Sarpotdar. The film has a clever plot about an unexpected crossover between the betaal community and the human community. Ayushmann Khurrana plays a social-media journalist named Alok. When he gets into an accident, he is saved by Taadaka, played by Rashmika Mandanna. The story keeps switching between our real world and a remote magical world like we’ve seen in Pataal Bhairavi-type movies. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a betaal named Yakshasan, but he’s not the villain in this romance between Alok and Taadaka. Yakshasan has other villainous ideas, and the romance almost helps him achieve them.
Ayushmann is in fine form. His lovely dance-acting to “Keh doon tumhe” made me wonder what he’d have been like in the old song-and-dance days. Rashmika has a tough role to play, and does this well – as though mimicking a puppet with humanoid qualities. (You’ll know why when you see the movie.) But the romance between Alok and Taadaka doesn’t catch fire. It doesn’t become the “I will go to the ends of the earth for you” type of thing that it wants to be. There’s a plot point involving Alok’s heartbeat, and it isn’t as affecting as it should be. There are very few scares. And despite Paresh Rawal and Geeta Aggarwal and Sathyaraj and Abhishek Banerjee in the cast, there’s no sense of playfulness. You can sense the joke-writing, but they don’t land because they are not exactly fresh or fun.
There are so many interesting things that can happen when a human being is introduced to a betaal, but none of these are explored well enough to establish a sense of myth. The beats are all solid, like why a betaal will think twice before drinking human blood. There’s a great bit of world-building when a human finds himself unable to understand a betaal conversation because the sound frequencies are different, or that a betaal is incapable of lying and therefore takes everything you say literally. Thamma needed more inventions like this, rather than just the big action set pieces. I guess this film has to bear the burden of setting up this part of the Maddock Universe, which is why Nawazuddin has such an abbreviated and generic role. (He will presumably be a bigger part in the future films.) But even so, you get the sense that more attention was lavished on item songs than on the script. The star cameo is fun, but Thamma suffers from having to be a part of a universe while also having to be its own movie. The result is anaemic.
