Chakra

Chakra, the new Vishal movie, wants to act like it is extremely smart. But the problem is that it looks ridiculously silly. What this movie projects as huge revelations and unexpected twists feel predictable for the viewer. And despite having a deafening background score throughout the film, I found the movie incredibly boring. Chakra is one movie that just doesn’t have anything unique about it.

The movie revolves around a particular robbery that happened on an August 15th. Fifty houses got robbed by two thieves, and police couldn’t do anything about it as it happened at a brisk pace. Chandru, an army intelligence officer, returned to Chennai after knowing that his house was also robbed. His grandmother got injured during the robbery when she tried to protect the medal of Chandru’s father. Thus Chandru gets involved in this case’s investigation and what we see is the investigation done by Chandru and his girlfriend Gayathri (who, by the way, is the Assistant Commissioner).

It is tough to write about movies that are just flat-out dull. Director MS Anandan is trying to assemble bits and pieces of familiar thrillers to create a sophisticated story visually. But the core of the story is pretty shallow. Just look at the character of Gayathri, for example. She is supposed to be this qualified, high-rank police officer, and you will find her urgency in making decisions ridiculous. It was almost like Anandan made that character so dumb to project the average intelligence of our hero as a supreme talent. The same goes for the creation of the antagonist as well. You are never getting a feeling that the villain here is giving any sort of competition to our hero.

The role of Chandru has nothing there for Vishal to perform rather than walking with that attitude of a military officer. What was really painful was seeing Shraddha Srinath as Gayathri. The character looks so Silly on screen, and there wasn’t anything she could do to make the poorly written character look graceful on screen. Regina Cassandra, as Leela, has a significant role in the movie, but again Anandan fails to develop a solid character. That character was an excellent opportunity to break the usual cliche, but Anandan couldn’t use that chance and ends up creating a lousy character.

MS Anandan loves the glossiness of the gizmo gadget virtual world. But as a writer, he is clearly clueless about how to infuse these hacking and other details of the virtual world fraud into a compelling story. Rather than giving an intricate plot with a powerful opponent, he just goes after moments that don’t contribute to the whole narrative. There is a scene in the movie where Vishal spends a significant amount of time finding a stolen bike, and one can clearly see Anandan trying desperately to connect that incident to the main plot so that it can act as a trigger. This incoherent nature of the script is the primary reason why the film never feels intriguing. The background score is excessive, and at times it felt too familiar. The cinematography follows a dark and moody texture mostly.

The jingoistic tone of the movie is another unsubtle inclusion from the director’s part just to capitalize on the soldier sentiment. Chakra felt like a movie that never bothered about writing a second draft of the script. Despite having fight sequences, chases, and cat and mouse games between hero and villain, this one felt too dull. I can’t even say that if they had reworked a particular section of the script, it would have worked.