Singam 3

It seems like Hari took Sampoornesh Babu’s Singam 123 as a very serious entertainer. Singam 3 aka Si 3 from Hari, his third outing in the franchise with Suriya is funny to be honest. There is a scene where our hero gets blocked by the Australian police at the airport and to convince them to leave him, he tells them about a particular operation in Singam 2 and guess what? The Australian police officer goes emotional and says “Lets open the gate for the universal cop”. If you felt Goosebumps hearing that, then Singam 3 is perfectly suitable for you. My reaction to that scene and the whole film was facepalm.

A police commissioner in Andhra Pradesh got killed in a particular scenario and the police investigation wasn’t going anywhere. So the Andhra Home Minister decides to bring in the most able police officer in India, Durai Singam for the investigation. His investigation to find the people behind the murder of the commissioner is the content of Singam 3.

Singam (first film) had a very limited space to work with. It was shuttling between a village and a city like Chennai. Even with heroic exaggerations, the film looked entertaining because of the minimal and sensible ambitions. In Singam 2 Hari pushed the envelope and made the plot silly. With Singam 3, he again goes for overambitious situations and with sloppy lazy writing that doesn’t give a damn about authenticity, the heroism becomes an excuse to laugh at the film. Story has nothing unpredictable and the cliché multiple villain format just goes on and on. When compared to the first two installments, the punch dialogues (USP) where quite less. Irrelevant side track comedy, a useless love story only to include one more heroine, illogical chases, unexplained unheard GPS-mobile tracking mechanisms and many elements are there in this film which makes it boring.

Suriya has a charm in uttering those furious dialogues and also in delivering the sentimental lines. He maintains that form neatly. Anushka gives a half hearted performance. Shruti Haasan’s performance is quite annoying because of the over acting. If they can delete all those scenes featuring Suri and Shruti, the movie would become a little less torturing. Thakur Anoop Singh as Vittal has that same expression we see in most of the villains in Telugu films + a well maintained body. Krish, Robo Shankar, Nithin Sathya, Radhika Sarathkumar, Sharath Saxena and many are there in the elaborate cast.

As always Hari’s making style is pretty much the same. Its loud, its frantic, background scorer has no time to rest and the camera is always high. Hari is known to make films like this in this format, but he has to know that there is an expiry date for every formula. People nowadays have access to so much of creative material and if you just show something like mobile phone tracking and hacking servers in shabby graphics, they are going to laugh at you. The movie is desperately going for hero worshipping without any real sense. Hari should never be allowed to make VR films as his camera angles can damage your brain. The camera is mostly on a drone and twice in the film we get to see a special camera angle where the cam is rigged at the bottom of the on screen character’s Smartphone and by the time they pick up the call we can almost see things inside their nose. Editor might have had a tough time finding the shots (so many are there). Music was disappointing and the songs were placed unevenly.

Singam 3 can be enjoyed if you are expecting a spoof kind of entertainer. I am not asking for realism in a franchise that has a super cop as title protagonist. A little more coherency is something that would make it enjoyable. Singam may have given Suriya a boost in being the action hero, but the franchise is definitely not evolving according to time.

Rating: 1.5/5

By Aswin Bharadwaj

Founder and editor of Lensmen Reviews.

View all of Aswin Bharadwaj's posts.