This Arun Vijay starrer is a total misfire. Every frame is designed to a micro-degree, sure, but there’s no coherence. That’s a short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Sometimes, you can tell about a movie right from the beginning. Two killers come in search of Arun Vijay, whose character is named Kaali. An accomplice asks Kaali if he should call the cops. But Kaali, lying down in a pool of artistic yellow light, says, “Enakku police naale allergy.” So you think we will find out why he’s allergic to men in uniform. Instead, we cut to Kaali, sitting on a chair like a king on a throne, saying, “A collection of happy memories is a good life.” But then, that’s Kaali for you. He likes saying these lines. Towards the end, he says, “I am a rare edition.” Is he really a book? Is that the big reveal at the climax? But then, he has something called head trauma. It must have come from his childhood, when poverty made him want to jump off a roof. A girl stops him. She says, “Ippa guthiche naa nee Kaali illa… gaali.” At that point, I think I got head trauma.
The battlefield of cinema is littered with the corpses of films that wanted to be something but ended up way short. And there are many, many reasons. Nobody actively sets out to make a bad movie. But Retta Thala is a special kind of misfire. It looks and feels like it was made not from a screenplay but a design brochure. It ends with a picture of poor Buddha, over which blood gets sprayed after a killing. It looks like the great teacher has suffered a head trauma. And then we get a quote from Buddha that desire is the root of all evil. Seriously? I desire a good movie. Is that so evil? Arun Vijay plays a double role in this story about crime. This other guy says things like “I am a lone wolf.” He ends up being eaten by crocodiles. I guess they couldn’t find piranhas. Wanting to be stylish is not a sin, but Retta Thala ends up being pretentious to such a degree that it makes you angry. The film feels like having biriyani in Belarus, to the background of a Beethoven sonata. I’ll have to end here, because I need to go home and attend to my own head trauma
