There is a particular style of counter-dialogue comedy that you expect in every Sivakarthikeyan movie, which is somewhere between the cringe and funny zone. Anudeep’s new movie Prince, starring Sivakarthikeyan, starts off with that typical style you associate with the star. But this romantic comedy runs out of ideas in the second half and what you end up seeing in the second half is excruciating and boring.
Anbu is a school teacher who bunks classes and goes to films instead of teaching the students. His father was a man who got narcissistic pleasure in being considered an important person in his village. Anbu’s approach toward his job changes when a British citizen named Jessica joins the school as the English teacher. How his romantic interest in Jessica changes his life is what we see in Prince.
An Indian man who has a father with patriotic sentiments falling in love with a British woman is an instantly funny idea, and it has all the possibility to be a political comedy considering the amount of hyper-nationalistic narratives we see every day. But Anudeep’s imagination has no plans to explore those terrains, and he prefers the skit joke part. I am not saying Prince is an entirely unfunny movie. The spoofy treatment of the film definitely looked funny in the initial bits. But the problem is that all those events aren’t really adding up in creating a conflict.
Sivakarthikeyan is in his comfort zone as Anbu, and in his typical style, he delivers a performance that fits the pitch of the comedy of this movie. Sathyaraj, who has been playing these funny father roles off late, was fine in terms of humor timing, but there is little he can do to the poor writing of the character. Seeing the trailer, I kind of feared Maria Ryaboshapka’s Tamil could well end up giving me a headache. But, to my surprise, she was perhaps the least annoying in terms of the amount of blabbering that happened on screen. Premgi Amaren is there as a real estate agent, who seemed like the antagonist in the first half but ended up as a comedian in the second half.
There is a bottle guard joke at the beginning of the movie that seems to go on and on as if they are trying to extend the film’s duration. The whole sequence can be considered a metaphor for the second half, especially the last act of the film Prince. After establishing the disapproval of the hero’s father as the movie’s central conflict at the interval point, Anudeep is stuck in terms of plot development. Just like the bottle guard sequence, the film adds humor pointlessly to delay the obvious climax. I still have no clue why the Soori and Anandraj sequences were not chopped off on the editing table.
Anudeep gives an impression in the beginning that he is going to do something to fix the stalker star image of Sivakarthikeyan when Jessica criticizes the intrusive behavior of Anbu. But when developing something fresh became a struggle, Anudeep decided to go after the usual tropes. In the end, the only funny thing that stays with you is Sivakarthikeyan’s self-referential jokes about the gibberish he writes as a lyricist.
This romantic comedy runs out of ideas in the second half and what you end up seeing in the second half is excruciating and boring.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
