This story of a cricketer stars Madhavan, Siddharth, Nayanthara, and Meera Jasmine. Their characters are all entangled in serious problems, but everything stays at a distance. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Arjun (Siddharth) is India’s most successful cricketer ever, but after a series of innings where he has been struggling for runs, his place in the Indian team is uncertain. He’s even asked by the board to retire. In other words, “test” is not just something Arjun wants to play on a pitch. It’s also something he is going through. Saravanan (Madhavan) is undergoing his own version of a test. His wife Kumudha (Nayanthara) wants an expensive IVF procedure, and Saravanan himself needs a lot of money to push his alternative energy project through to the various deciding authorities. You could say that the title applies to Kumudha, too. She desperately wants a child, and the doctor tells her that she needs to stay away from stress, but almost everything Saravanan does is a test of her patience. And in between, we have Arjun’s wife Padma (Meera Jasmine). She is tested when their young son is kidnapped.
And these tests lead to desperate times, which means desperate measures. There is an excellent point that Saravanan makes when his invention runs into yet another roadblock. Why is Arjun – a guy whose job is just to hit a ball with a bat – considered a hero, while someone who is trying to revolutionise the energy space is treated like a zero? But the film doesn’t probe anything very deeply, and even without this subtext, even as just a series of tense and thrilling events, it doesn’t deliver. When Arjun steps out to bat and can’t find his form, the commentator says: “There is visible tension in the Indian dugout and on the faces of Chepauk fans.” This tension does not translate to the viewer, because you don’t feel Arjun’s desperation. The pacing is off, and the performances don’t come together.
Maybe they wanted to keep it all very classy, like Nayanthara’s improbably coordinated clothes and look. But sometimes a film needs to shout – not literally but in a way that makes us fear for these people. Saravanan’s switch to a bad guy is so sudden that it’s almost comical. Yes, we have seen the incremental steps that lead to his unraveling, but they don’t add up to this one big scene. Also, the relationships don’t draw us in. Arjun’s equation with his wife is practically non-existent on screen, and the Kumudha-Saravanan equation raises many questions. The film throws in match-fixing in an Indo-Pak test series, the possibility of a middle-class boy getting to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a hospitalised father, a teacher who suddenly begins to show shades of grey, and a couple of cops on a case. But everything exists at the level of a potentially interesting idea, nothing more. A very specific idea about zero and hero ends up a very generic watch.
