Kodi, the last outing of the combination of RS Durai Senthilkumar and Dhanush was an engaging grey thriller that sort of stayed with me. Coming to the new film from this combo Pattas, the feeling one gets is extremely underwhelming. Durai Senthilkumar has no intention to surprise the viewer. A tedious screenplay that just doesn’t have anything different from the pattern offers zero excitement to the viewer and the only take away here was the performance of Dhanush in the flashback sequence as an Adimurai expert.
Pattas is our hero and he is this small-time thief. A robbery he did to agitate a girl who mocked him, ends up in a clumsy scenario. The incident eventually showed him who he really was. Who were his parents and what really happened to him and the obvious revenge of the guy is the plot of the movie.
SPOILER ALERT! A mother losing her child and then meeting him after so many years, son saving the mother from a lot of goons, son knowing about his great father and his sacrifice, etc. are the things that we mock as they have become the references for calling something outdated or clichéd. And all these elements are there in Pattas. The writing here has no regard for the updated mindset of the viewers. Introduction song for the hero, an utterly pointless heroine and a lot of totally irrelevant scenes featuring that heroine, one grand fight scene where the hero sort of becomes superman, etc are happening here and the flashback sequence has another set of clichés that are also underwhelming. Towards the end we have our heroes saying the same thing and that is about educating at least Tamilians about their own in house martial art form called Adimurai. That’s the only achievement of this movie; some of you may eventually Google about Adimurai.
Dhanush has given a distinct feel to both characters he played on screen. As Pattas, he is in that Maari kind of zone with all the humor happening smoothly and as Perumal, he is more in that serious zone. Sneha as the wife of Perumal has got a good role when you compare it with the other poorly written characters in this whole movie. She also gets to portray a better range of emotions. If the makers can remove the whole back-story of the character Sadhana Shah played by Mehreen Pirzada, it will be a great service to the audience as the bad writing and bad acting are competing with one another in that phase. Naveen Chandra as Nilan is that one-dimensional animated antagonist. Nasser, Munishkanth, etc are the other memorable names in the cast.
RS Durai Senthilkumar sort of goes back to his Kakki Sattai style masala film formula with this movie. Pattas never really has a moment that would make you want to say that it had some plans, they could have improved that part, etc. The movie is so peripheral in terms of how it creates its characters. The whole MMA portion doesn’t carry any sort of emotional high. The character played by Sneha was in jail in Kerala and the Malayalam you get to hear and read in the movie is horrible. There are so many Keralites in Tamil Nadu and anyone would have helped the filmmakers in fixing such terrible things. Om Prakash’s cinematography is focusing only on bringing out the style factor and the frequent cuts by Prakash Babu ruin the experience considerably. The songs in the flashback portions had a good vibe to them and the placing of songs wasn’t that smooth.
Pattas is a predictable movie with a shallow script. At a time when you have a movie like Kaithi getting released as a festival entertainer and winning the hearts of the viewers, a mundane creation like Pattas shows how unaware some filmmakers are about the evolved audience.
A tedious screenplay that just doesn’t have anything different from the pattern offers zero excitement to the viewer and the only take away here was the performance of Dhanush in the flashback.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended