Thread: Mafia chapter 1: Thoughts

There were 2 elements about this movie that compelled me to watch it even before the trailer dropped:
1) The 2nd movie of Karthick Naren to come out, after he made a stellar debut with a brilliant D16.
2) Arun Vijay being in fine form recently with critically acclaimed roles and steady boxoffice wins like kuttram 23, CCV, Thadam etc...

The shoddy prologue accompanied by the identical bgm from the opening joker bank robbery scene from 'the dark knight', should have been a warning signal in itself, about whats about to come... Soon after, the title cards begin rolling to a song thats a blatant and shameless rip-off of 'pray for me' performed by the weeknd and kendrick lamar... And the song played to introduce prasanna's character is structurally similar to 'theemai dhan'(another villain theme song) from thani oruvan... Its frustrating to see a talented music director like jakes bejoy resort to plagiarising and he dropped the ball here big time...

Coming to the premise, its about a narcotics officer, aryan and his team warring on the ever rising drug problem... The movie is high on style, like introducing the key characters with their own songs, but with little substance... There are far too many slo mo shots and sequences, that could put an amal neerad movie to shame... Barring for some good moments that are too few and far between, the narrative is predictable and an unambitious mess...The pre interval portions were comparatively good, piquing an interest as we progress into the 2nd half but that flickering light of hope soon fizzles out with more cliche and lazy writing... There are far too many coincidences in the narrative and thats an instant turn off... Even the climax twist that must have been intended by the makers to be the quintessential 'WTF' moment, was eerily visible a mile away and frankly laughable by that point...

I dont know if im being too harsh on the movie but that may be due to the fact that I never expected such a lazy piece of work from a potentially talented filmmaker like karthik naren... He set new benchmarks in crime thriller genre with his debut flick 'Dhruvangal 16' much like jeethu did with drishyam in family thriller genre. Granted, the pressure on their succeeding projects must have been sky high... But even then, i felt oozham was watchable but the same cannot be said about Mafia... Its true what they say that, the true mark of a filmmaker can only be evaluated by the way he makes his 2nd film(technically naragasuran, but still)...

Coming to perfomances, Arun Vijay and Prasanna look dapper and does whats required of them elegantly... Looking forward to watching Prasanna as a baddie(he was the only redeeming factor in brother's day for me) in more future projects...

Overall, a below par movie experience... Maybe the only objective for this movie was to act as a lead in into chapter 2 wherein, presumably, the core story happens much like bahubali 1 and KGF chapter 1 and maybe the best is yet to come... However the crucial difference here is that, while movies like Lucifer, Bahubali, KGF can be considered as stand-alone good movies, Mafia misses the mark by a longshot...

The only good that has come off watching this movie is that now, I have much lesser expectations regarding 'Naragasuran'...

Rating- 2/5

Thank You Dear

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