Brother Review | Dated Packaging Combined With Serial-Level Messaging

In his prime, director M Rajesh used to get it right in cracking that irreverent kind of humor through his movies. It was the signature humor that made him unique. But of late, he has been overdoing it, and the sheer lack of a proper story or the presence of a shitty story was making his movies box office bombs. His latest venture, Brother, starring Jayam Ravi, thematically stays away from his usual wafer-thin ideas. But the preachy old-school theme is so outdated that after the first quarter of the movie, it feels like a serial.

Karthik, our hero, hasn’t finished his LLB, and his father is not really proud of him, for that matter. When Karthik gets involved in a rift with the association members of his apartment, his sister Anandhi takes him away from Chennai to her husband’s home in Ooty. What we see in the film are the events that unfold in that house during this reformation training of Karthik.

Remember some of those 90s movies we used to see where the hero will be like this middle-class or lower-middle-class man with values, and the heroine or the negative characters will be from a rich backdrop? And towards the end, the only person with “values” in that family will slap his partner, usually the evil, sleeveless blouse mother-in-law, and the movie will end happily. Brother is pretty much a tweaked re-entry of that formula. The daughter-in-law here is responding to the domestic abuse she had to face, and there is no hesitation for her to talk about self-respect. And unlike the old movies, here, the father-in-law is the adamant guy who needs to get a whack. It might feel like the conflict here is pretty updated. But the problem here is the resolution, as it is going after the cheesiest and lamest solutions possible.

SPOILERS AHEAD! So, at one point, Anandhi’s father-in-law, the collector of that district, insults her family, and when she demands an apology, her husband slaps her, which results in her leaving that house with her kids. So Karthik is now burdened with the duty of solving this problem. So, he decides to invite his IFS officer brother-in-law to a school function. There, Karthik stages a drama about family relationships, and God is telling the kids of Karthik’s sister that they can’t have both father and mother. They need to choose one. Seeing the sadness of the kids on stage, the brother-in-law immediately apologizes to the wife and takes her back. While I was watching that whole scene, somewhere, I was hoping the old M Rajesh would kick in and make that scene some sort of dream sequence. But no. After that, it is a series of back-to-back I am sorry events, and the execution of all of that is super cheesy.

After a series of serious characters in films, Jayam Ravi goes back to the lighter mode with this film, and the acting demands are pretty minimal as the meter of the performance is on the higher side. Priyanka Mohan gets to be this chilled-out lover girl who wasn’t really an essential entity for the core story. Bhumika Chawla, as Anandhi, plays an important role in the film, as the sister. But again, the high-on-drama performance never felt like a challenge for these actors. Natarajan Subrahmaniam, Rao Ramesh, Saranya Ponvannan, etc., are the other major names in the star cast of this film.

The only thing I can consider as a positive in this movie, which is designed specifically for a B and C center audience, is that they are using domestic abuse and the idea of self-respect to create a conflict, and there is no effort to justify the abuser by making that a result of some sort of work stress or conditioning. I do agree that some of the guilt-tripping that happens in this movie is kind of insensitive, but the creative shoddiness itself was enough to reject this lame festival package.