Chennai City Gangsters Movie Review: Gangsters without the gang or the stars
Two thieves lose their boss's money and recruit four washed-up conmen to pull off increasingly ridiculous heists to pay him back.
Chennai City Gangsters Movie Review:
Written By:
Abhinav Subramanian
You know that friend who tells the same story at every party? Chennai City Gangsters is that friend with a film budget. This comedy parade of familiar faces doing familiar shtick feels less like a movie and more like someone's favorite playlist got sentient and decided to rob a bank.The setup involves orphaned thieves Pandi ( Vaibhav ) and Poochi (Manikandan) botching a fake robbery for their boss's boss—a scheme where Pasupathy (Livingston) plays middleman to Saleem's (Shihan Hussaini) insurance fraud. After losing the loot at a bar (naturally), they team up with Nettai (Redin Kingsley) who introduces them to the "legendary" Chennai City Gangsters: Split Soosai (Anandraj), whose personality literally splits when he hears police sirens, Memory Das (Mottai Rajendran), who, well, will let you guess what his quirk is, and assorted other gangsters who wouldn't scare a pigeon. Together, this motley crew hatches an absurd heist to repay Saleem.Director Vikram Rajeshwar seems to operate on quantity over quality, firing jokes like a malfunctioning comedy cannon. The film treats its plot as optional scaffolding for sketch comedy, but forgets that even sketch comedy needs timing. Characters exist purely as one-note gags: Pandi moons over his crush Jeni ( Athulya Ravi ) between bungled crimes, while each gang member gets exactly one personality quirk milked dry. It's comedy by committee, where everyone's a dimwit by design, hoping collective stupidity equals collective laughs.Sure, broken clocks and all that, so occasionally something lands. The second half finds minor rhythm when Anandraj's cop mode kicks in, turning on his own crew. Vaibhav, Manikandan, and Redin Kingsley work with what they're given, which isn't much beyond "play fools, make faces." Mottai Rajendran's been doing his thing for more than a decade now, bless him.File this under 'films that exist,' nothing more, nothing less.
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