Sumo movie review: Comic talents are squandered in this comedy that needed more absurdity, less drama

Indian Express

25-04-2025

Sumo movie review: The first time you meet Yoshinori Tashiro in Shiva's latest film, Sumo, he is wearing a mawashi, the outfit worn by Sumo wrestlers. Apparently, he washed up the shores of Chennai, and has the mental makeup of a 1.5-year-old child. And somehow, that means, the wrestler's only focus is to satiate his tremendous appetite. He finds an immediate connection with Shiva (Shiva) because… well, you need a reason for the movie to move on, and they didn't find anything else to do. Willing suspension of disbelief, anyone? After this point, we are asked to willingly suspend our disbelief on multiple occasions, and we would have done exactly that if the film didn't abruptly shift tones in every second scene to thrust a sense of reality in the world of absurdity.
This is a world where the sudden entrant into the world of Shiva is named Ganesh, because you know… he is the god with the paunch? Ganesh is hungry, and is fed with biscuits, lollipops and sandwiches. However, he is suddenly enrolled in an idly-eating competition, where no prizes for guessing who wins. We then find him thulping on noodles and fried rice kept for the guests of a cafe owned by Jack (VTV Ganesh). Oh, and Shiva is a surfer in the film, but he is seen more as an errand man in the cafe-cum-surf bar, and it makes you wonder why he couldn't have just been an employee at Jack's cafe instead of being a surfer. But I am digressing… Ganesh is then used as Lord Ganapathi's stand-in during the Vinayaka Chaturthi celebrations. He is then used as the stand-in Lord Ganapathi at a social event. Why? By now, you must have understood the futilities of asking such questions.
Oh, and then, Ganesh, who has the mind of a child, is bullied by a villain gang, who have nothing better to do because their boss is played by Yogi Babu, who has nothing to do in the film. But yeah, it allows Shiva to flex his muscles, and less said about these detours, the better for the film. At one point, Shiva, his girlfriend Kani (Priya Anand, who is criminally underutilised), and Jack figure out that Ganesh is from Japan. And how do they do it? A random school boy has a flag-naming competition in school, and Shiva takes him and Ganesh to a gift store to buy flags, and voila! Ganesh stares a bit too long at the Japan flag. Forget the fact that he had the same stare when seeing a lollipop a few scenes before. But yeah, why bother questioning?
Anyway, there is also the mandatory Rajinikanth -Japan connection that is made to, you know, get the applause in the theatre. Somehow, they make the Japan connect, and they come to know that Ganesh is a Sumo wrestler from Japan. One might wonder why they never made the connect when Ganesh was literally in his mawashi when they first met him. One might wonder why they never thought of trying to keep up the doctor's appointment to understand why he isn't speaking anything. One might wonder what Yogi Babu was even doing in this film. But then, you'd have to extend the same logic to many of the characters in the film, and that becomes quite the slippery slope.
With the strength of the film seemingly lying in comedy, the detours into emotional zones, and some serious zones are distracting at best, and infuriating at their worst. It is almost like the makers can't decide what to do with the simple one-liner, and fill it up with embellishments that only disengage us. Talking about distractions, composer Nivas K Prasanna's attempts to magnify every emotion with his background score, is only slightly better than the random emotional number that comes to highlight the connect between Shiva and Ganesh. No, there is no emotional core in the film because the makers don't even have a single scene to establish why they become friends. See, we are ready to go on this ride in the belief that the film will just gloss over these nuances, and just make us laugh without thinking too much. But when that isn't happening regularly, these outliers become all the more grating.
Once the film moves to Japan, one might imagine Sumo might get better. Honestly, these portions are funny, but of the unintentional kind. It feels less like a film, but more like an extended version of a 'Just for Gags' episode strung together by unnecessary scenes. However, there are certain laugh-out-loud moments courtesy Shiva's poker-faced one-liners. It makes you wonder why SP Hosimin didn't take the absurd route in a film that is about a random surfer taking a sumo wrestler back home. The film had the potential to be so much more, considering the premise, and the star cast. And the prologue and the epilogue of the story has VTV Ganesh doing some increasingly random things. Yet, the makers are bogged down by their inexplicable need to find logic and reasoning to their own outlandish machinations, and we are left wondering… 'Wait, what did we just see?'