2018, Tamil, Amazon prime and Netflix, 7/10 IMDB, Directed by Pawan Kumar
Remake from a new age Kannada blockbuster, U-turn starts off intelligently with a thriller mode, travels fairly well, ends insanely with a revenge saga of a ghost.
The women centric lady power journalist story picks off with an interesting mysterious thread but falls flat when the story steers towards the spectral side.
You are reminded of Mercury where Prabhu Deva comes back as a ghost to take revenge after he is killed in an unintentional RTA especially by a bunch of hearing impaired.
Here the accident is caused by one of the innumerable selfish, irresponsible road users who recklessly violate traffic rules causing unintentional accident ending up the lives of a mom and daughter.
The story ends with a pathetic serial ghost revenge by an innocent RTA victim, but the director screams for attention with the logic upgradation by making the ghost more humanly with no weird makeup and no super power to find the culprit who moved the road blocks to cause a topple in the first place to make a deadly U-turn..
The twist to who moved the road block which later on proves to be the cause of a fatal accident was commendable but the sequence of events lacks the suspense elements as they were predictable..
Samantha’s opening dialogues with her mom in an auto was a clever start to make us relate to the characters, as the conversation with her mom about getting married is the suprabhatha of every household with grownup daughters.. For a change kinda felt sad for the daughters for us moms nagging them often. But hey, we moms are born to panic and revolve our thoughts around our daughters, right? Another beautiful converstion in second half when the story had already stepped into more serious thriller note, a sheer pride moment speaking volumes of mom-daughter relationship.. Makes us moms proud of our daughters, for coming back to us, inspite of our constant reprimands.
Solo Samantha holds fort parallelly with the doe-eyed Aadhi Pinisetty (pity the handsome home grown didn’t get the deserved run in the industry) playing a good cop. His characterisation is not aptly justified for all the help he does to Samantha, going out of his way even after suspension.
Samantha’s love interest Rahul Ravindran underplays and later creeps up as a suspect and then proved innocent, all in a low profile flow, ending up with not much of an impact on the viewer.
If not for the ghostly aspect, it could have been an hard hitting movie making one think twice before violating traffic rules however insignificant it may be, like just taking an unauthorized U-turn by moving the road block making it an hindrance causing fatality.
Colour tone of the movie compliments the genre though background score is not phenomenal to substantiate the events. ‘No song movie’ was an added feature to join hands with the movies that matter with content and kudos to cinematography for briefing and elevating the mood.
Missed opportunity to accomplish the purpose of making the movie but still a watchable amongst the mundane masala movies. Kudos for the decent attempt.