16-05-2025
DD Next Level Review: Santhanama's Latest Is A Meta Comedy Of Patchy Creative Brilliance
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While many meta ideas work, a huge chunk of comedy in DD Next Level doesn't. The creativity is sporadic, making you wish the film could have done better.
DD film series has a tested template. It starts with a prologue about a haunted place and moves to a first half that deals with the romance of the lead pair and their arrival at the place of horror and finally, the third act of horror-comedy cocktail.
DD Next Level, the costliest of the series, is a bit more interesting despite following the template to a large extent. Adding a meta layer to the template has made a huge difference to the worn-out horror-comedy genre. However, the novelty runs out of steam pretty soon as the filmmakers run out of ideas in the second half, resorting to the usual antics of the genre.
The prologue of this genre has a popular real-life YouTube film reviewer going to a film theatre on the outskirts of the city on an invitation for a special show. He is the only one at the cinema, which turns out to be a haunted place. The ghost of Hitchcock Irudhayaraj (Selvaraghavan) kills the reviewer as an act of revenge for all the bad reviews.
The story of DD Next Level is what you get when Balki's Chup meets Arnold Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero. Yet, S Prem Anand refuses to elevate the movie to such great heights as he is stuck in the condescension of pandering to the assumed lowest common denominator of public taste. The pedestrian prologue is self-evident to it. Why not cut the chase and start with the protagonist getting the invite? But lack of such finesse is not the biggest problem of DD Next Level.
The sporadic creativity and the progressively regressing humour are the overarching problems of the film. Kissa 47 (Santhanam) and Veen Pechu Babu (Rajendran) are funny when they indulge in meta-humour that takes a dig at the cliches and tropes of the film genre. Kissa reading out the subtitles of foreign language, predicting a flashback with the transition shot, and accessing imminent danger with the haunting background scores are some nice touches, though they don't bring about laughs. At one instance, Kissa 47 asks his friend to relax, 'It is a safe scene as there's no re-recording."
But the makers don't go beyond scratching such surfaces. The meta humour is the only good thing going for the film as whenever it switches to Tamil cinema's usual slapstick comedy, the film slumps. Rajendran's Veena Pechu Babu gets painted in silver for an extremely silly reason. The excuse that it all happens within a film wouldn't fly as the humour is puerile even for a cartoon. That's the irony of DD Next Level: A film that's quick to mock cliches and stupidity, and resorts to the same when it has nothing else going on for it.
The adult humour tries to indulge with the characters of Kasthuti and Yashika, who play mother and daughter and need more dexterity and awareness. Instead, it becomes borderline crass. Here, too, the film barely scratches the surface. Thus, watching DD Next Level turns out to be like eating a pack of boring biscuits with bits of good chocolates in them. But as you work through the packet, there are more boring biscuits and no chocolate.
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