Ace Movie Review: A passable crime caper that doesn't demand much from its actors & audience

Time of India

23-05-2025

Ace Movie Synposis: A man with a past comes to Malaysia to turn over a new leaf. But when he realises that the girl he loves needs money to get out of a difficult situation, he commits a robbery that makes him the target of a fearsome gangster and the girl's stepfather, an immoral cop.
Ace Movie Review: Ace is the kind of film which can be enjoyed best when we enter the theatre sans our thinking cap. It involves crime, but is not really a crime film. The crime involves a heist, but this isn't exactly a heist film. There's romance, but the film is hardly a romance drama. There's humour, so is this a comedy? Well, not really! It's a film that wants to be everything and nothing specific at the same time, with uneven shifts in tone, loosely directed scenes, casual performances and simplistic plotting.
And yet, it's engaging, sort of. Even if the first half is filled with quite a few flat moments, the gradual blooming of romance between Vijay Sethupathi and Rukmini Vasanth adds some emotional weight to a largely non-serious story that seems to be going in all directions — a cop exploiting a hapless young woman, a loan shark who doesn't let his victims go easily, a principled heroine caught in a strange domestic situation, a mysterious hero who is an ace at poker, his female friend who keeps getting into financial troubles, and an almost walk-in-the-park heist that makes a mockery of banking security and law enforcement.
Somehow, Arumuga Kumar manages to bring all these disparate threads together, though if you've seen a fair share of Tamil crime capers from the last decade, you can easily predict how things are going to end. There are a couple of nice twists, too… like the cop's connection with the hero and the latter's murky past. Then, there's the film's tendency to keep things at a comical level, sometimes unintentionally as well, which helps us to look past the logical loopholes and wild tonal shifts. Still, it should all have been wackier than it's now, but in its present form, the film feels just passable, something that we wouldn't mind watching on a lazy Saturday night.
And the cast helps. Even if he's on autopilot, Vijay Sethupathi injects some charisma into the role, and has lowkey fun with material that's less demanding of the actor in him, much like how Kamal Haasan used to in films like Guru and Sattam in the 1980s. Rukmini, in her Tamil debut, passes muster; while her expressions are spot on, her lip-sync, though, is quite off in many places. To give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe her lines were rewritten during the dubbing stage. Babloo Prithveeraj and BS Avinash are okayish as the antagonists while Divya Pillai has little to do in an underwritten role. Thankfully, Yogi Babu is in good form here, and it is his comic counters that make the film entertaining to the extent it is.