Director: UR Jameel
Cast: Hansika Motwani, Srikanth, Silambarasan (Cameo)
Maha is a film that’s unfortunately been in the news for the wrong reasons post release. The released version allegedly doesn’t have the blessings of the director and that’s never a good sign. This was actually supposed to be a milestone film for many reasons- UR Jameel’s debut as a director, Hansika’s 50th as an actor and Ghibran’s 25th as a composer. The version that has been released at least is underwhelming.
At its core, you could classify Maha as a slasher film. Sujith Shankar, in one of the high points of the film, essays the role of the menacing serial killer Matthew. Matthew has been abducting and killing girl children in the city and pressure is mounting on the police who are clueless about his whereabouts. In due course, Matthew kidnaps Aishwarya, the young daughter of Maha (Hansika Motwani). Maha, who has already faced tragedy once before in life, races against time to save her daughter.
I felt the biggest problem in Maha was how some neat ideas didn’t really translate into a cohesive script. The writing is quite cliched and pedestrian. The serial killer is right out of many other films we’ve watched and the fact that this character kept a blood soaked bathtub in his living room had me in splits. Even the abduction scenes are written with little or no imagination. A kid is kidnapped when she’s playing ‘ringa-ringa-roses’ and the kidnapper’s modus operandi for all his abductions is that he uses a spiked lollipop.
The film has a couple of decent twists right at the middle but this again is undone in the sequences post the interval. In a bizarre turn of events, Maha gets hold of all the case files and begins investigating herself. What was absurd was how she managed to derive clues out of digital evidences like audio recordings when even expert cyber cell hackers couldn’t. That these ‘clues’ were highly illogical in themselves is another matter.
STRs cameo is brief and forgettable. He plays an airline pilot who also beats up bad guys (and I don’t mean with his ‘punch’ dialogues). There’s an interfaith relationship angle between STR and Hansika’s characters that doesn’t really offer any further payoff in the screenplay.
Probably the best part about the film, and I hope it was intentional, was the sarcastic take on the police’s investigation of the case. The final scene where the cop (played by Srikanth) comes rushing to the crime scene after the villain is already long dead is genuinely funny. So is the mischievous news clipping that follows lavishing praise on the police department for ‘solving’ the case. Such scenes are sadly few and far between in a film that offers little in terms of real thrills.
Overall rating: 1.5/5
