Muddy

Muddy is what happens when you decide to look at the driving license of actors instead of their audition tapes. Directed by Dr. Pragabhal, Muddy has only one aim. Show some footage of the off-road race. The quality of the script is never a concern for the makers. Even the most clichéd of scripts sometimes manages to be bearable due to the charm of actors. Sadly for Muddy, even that department is not doing any help. Fresh faces Yuvan Krishna and Ridhaan Krishna are trying desperately to be the heroes with swagger. But facepalm is the only emotion they can trigger in the viewer.

Muthu lives in this forest area. He earns a living by transporting logs through difficult terrains in his jeep named Garudan. He has a cousin-brother Karthi who isn’t on good terms with him. Karthi is an off-road racer. The movie Muddy primarily focuses on a difficult phase in Karthi’s race life where his brother Muthu decides to support him.

Usually, post-production of any film is that phase of filmmaking where movies get rewritten based on multiple things. It seems like Dr. Pragabhal has no regard for the viewer who is watching the film. The antagonist in the movie is Tony, and he is basically the cousin brother of Kalakeyan from Baahubali. No, I am not trying to make a racist remark here. The mannerisms given to that character in order to make him a bad guy are hilariously bad. And why is he speaking such complicated Malayalam dialogues in that accent? During post-production, I can’t believe nobody told the director to rewrite the dialogues or dub for that actor (heroes are also terrible in the dialogue delivery part).

As I said, the script is there for the sake of having a script. You have a hero who is like the all in all package. He fights goons, keeps his mom happy, drops kids at school, never looks at the girl who has a humongous crush on him, and he never takes a penny from poor people who are transported to the workplace in his jeep. Basically a rugged version of Annaatthe. But this Annan’s concern is about his partially mad brother Karthi. The film tries to show a back story about the rivalry between Tony and Karthi. You will wonder why these people are so loud emotionally. The background score has no sense of relevance. In the racing sequence, I liked how the editor kept the continuity to a great extent.

Yuvan Krishna as Muthu tries his best to be stylish and minimal. But his dialogue delivery was terrible, and the monotonous character just looked boring. Ridhaan Krishna as Karthi is basically playing a man child with just two expressions. Renji Panicker appears here and there in the movie as the Godfather figure of Muthu. Amit Shivadas Nair was my personal favorite as his villain character really made me laugh out loud.

Muddy is an unintentional comedy. They promoted this movie as Indian’s first movie based on mud race. Well, even the script of this movie has too much mud, which they never bothered clearing. Muddy is a killer combination of bad acting and bad making. If you are an off-road enthusiast, watch an actual off-road rally rather than this film.