Inga Naan Thaan Kingu Review – Entertains Occasionally!
Ashwin Ram
Inga Naan Thaan Kingu is a comedy thriller starring Santhanam, debutant Priyalaya, Thambi Ramaiah and Bala Saravanan in the lead roles. The music is scored by D.Imman which is made by the first time filmmaker Anand Narayan.
Premise:
Santhanam has a debt of 25 lakhs, the lender visits his home and accidentally dies. Along with his wife and in-laws, Santhanam covers up the whole incident. But someone unexpected intrudes the party that results in further problems for the family.
Writing/ Direction:
The story begins with a bomb-blast angle, which connects interestingly with the core characters at the halfway mark. It begins with a boring oration, then picks up when Santhanam gets fooled by marrying a girl from a zamin family. Then it again goes into a dull phase by showcasing the equation between the hero and his in-laws. The film heats up in the pre-interval block where the story actually progresses and the midpoint twist creates curiosity despite being predictable. When the humour lands, it does make a strong impact in the form of laughter, but it only happens occasionally when the situations and dialogue counters blend well. The story had good potential to strike big with the double-action element and by assembling all the comedians together in the finale, unfortunately the director failed to utilize these highlight factors cleverly. The film never delivered that blasting stretch with the fun quotient, it was always limited. Many lame reference jokes that clicked exactly at a single moment, to an atrocious level to which the team has thanked Kamal Haasan in the title credits for digging deep about Vikram movie, all it did was reminding the famous ‘Lollu Sabha’ show. The terrorism topic is touched just for namesake by not giving proper justification to it, conveniently came to an end. The treatment is evidently age-old, a duet number between the lead pair and an upbeat song towards the end shot in a set are placed after how long in Kollywood.
Performances:
Firstly, great efforts from Vivek Prasanna as he played a dead man in a believable manner almost throughout the movie. Santhanam jokes partially worked, some counters were enjoyable and sadly many were flat, also his hairstyle looked weird. No big contribution from the debut heroine Priyalaya, she just physically exists in all the scenes. Thambi Ramaiah is so loud which is highly irritating to consume. Huge screen-space for Bala Saravanan, but his presence was a valuable addition only in the hilarious mortuary sequence where he carried himself well. Many other comedy artists like Munishkanth, Swaminathan, Seshu, etc weren’t useful for the subject in terms of entertainment and existence mainly because they were forcefully included. Pity of Mano Bala, it was difficult to watch his portions with some rando trying to badly imitate his voice.
Technicalities:
Such a poor film which is low on quality in terms of technical aspects. D.Imman’s songs have nice foot-tapping tunes, but they sound old-fashioned. Santhanam seems to be uninterested as he did not even lip-sync correctly for the lyrics. Zero efforts with background score as it felt like stock music was played for every situation. Abstract camera work, very ordinary angles and the visual quality was notorious in many places with no craft whatsoever. Quite a crisp runtime of 130 minutes, the film could have been trimmed a little, yet a decent by the editor by presenting things together neatly.
Bottomline
Engagement is on and off as the humour partly clicks and partly falters. Given the scope with respect to the cinematic liberties taken and the insane number of comedy artists the team managed to garner, it could have been much more.
Rating – 2.5/ 5
