Review of Billa 2 – You will B ill-a.
Fate often throws a cruel twist in our otherwise mundane
existence and I experienced one such twist on Sunday evening – I watched Billa
2. Your condolences are accepted.
The movie is supposedly a prequel to Ajith’s Billa released
a couple of years back. I haven’t watched that movie per se, but have heard
that it was a “slick” movie – till date I really don’t know what a slick movie
is. As a prequel to that movie, this one is supposed to end with the audience
being shown who Billa is and how he became what he became.
The problem with most prequels is that, you know the ending.
Actually, in the case of 99% of the Indian movies, you very well know the
ending. So, it is safe to assume that this movie is going to end with Billa
being shown as an overpowering Don. Then the interest only remains as to how he
became such a big shot and also as to why he became a Don and not a Software
engineer. Sadly, this movie fails miserably to capture that vital essence.
When you have a prequel, a fundamental establishment of fact
is the timeline. This aspect has been conveniently ignored throughout the
movie. The movie opens with Billa landing in India as a refugee and by the time
the movie ends, the timeline would have actually progressed barely 3 months and
I am being very kind on the folks behind the camera with that assumption. You
are shown Chennai filled with Ambys & Premier Padminis (Fiats) establishing
circa of 1980s, but you also get to see vehicles with registration number in
the format of TN-45…etc. which came into vogue in the 90s. You also see him
toting Oakley sunglasses, something that is barely 10 years old in India,
today. He uses a cell phone towards the end of the movie, something that is
again late 90s, but his niece remains at the same age (pre-college) forever.
Billa just moves from one job to another literally every
scene. He helps smuggle diamonds and is suddenly introduced to a guy wanting to
smuggle cocaine. He volunteers for that job and lands up in Goa, successfully
of course. Right when he is settling the deal, he opts to help an International
arms dealer by bringing a cache of smuggled arms and ammunition from the
Government’s Depot (supposedly recovered by the Govt. from that dealer). That
too he does successfully by using a reloading shot gun (the kind used by
Terminator 2) in the face of an army using sub-machine guns.
There is this thing called blood splatter. It is again very
basic science but that too has been let go in the movie, lest Ajith’s face
become too gory. You can see him stab the jugular of every other guy and yet
not even one tiny squirt of blood. But then, somebody alerted the film crew and
so they have added it in some places – a guy gets stabbed in the right and the
blood comes out in the left; that kind of post-production quality.
The final action scene in the helicopter is supposed to be
something very exciting for a Tamil movie. Billa is fighting a villain in the
chopper and they both throw each other into all parts of the chopper. Quite often,
they even hang out and manage to come back. They keep banging each other into
the cockpit door. But the pilot doesn’t bother to land the chopper and save his
boss. Instead, being a sincere sihaamani, he simply keeps flying!!!
There was also a lot of hype in the media about the leading
ladies Parvathy Omanakuttan and Bruna Abdullah. Both of them appear in the
movie for around 14 minutes and that duration is their sum total. Whenever the
latter appears on screen, she is in a bikini and yet one gets the feeling –
sorry, one gets no feeling. The former has given a performance that matches
Ajith’s performance in the movie. He has a single expression throughout – a
look in the face that one could ostensibly get under severe constipation. She,
by virtue of possessing a much better looking and younger face, doesn’t have
that constipated look; instead she opts for a dead-pan expression that covers a
gamut of emotions like happiness, sadness, jealousy and anger.
There was this kidnap and rescue scene of this Parvathy
character and that was definitely a WTF moment. The babe is standing in a field
with hand and mouth tied. There are some 4-5 snipers hiding a short distance
away, clearly to kill Billa. Then 6 cars come from nowhere; circle the girl for
some time and one car stops. Billa is in that car and he picks her up. Then 3
cars go in one direction and the other 3 go in the opposite direction. This leaves
the snipers confounded and they don’t kill him. Really? 6 snipers couldn’t shoot
down 6 cars? Couldn’t they find that one car stop and pick her up? Couldn’t they
track that car alone? Or simply, to be safe, shoot all the 6 cars? Yikes!!!!!
At the beginning of the movie, we are also shown a shady Police
officer who for some reason speaks in Hindi to Sri Lankan Tamil refugees. The other
glaring part was that the movie was that it is rated “A”, but all the cuss
words have been muted. And before I forget,
Billa and his associates are all Sri Lankan Tamil refugees whose Tamil accent is pretty darn neutral from the first
dialogue itself!
The good part of the movie is definitely the fact that there
is no kuthu song. Even the 1-2 songs that were there in the movie haven’t registered
themselves in my mind. The better part of the movie was the scenes shot in Barovia
(which incidentally is a fictional place that is worshipped by many an online
gamer). But the best part of the movie was that it ended.
4 comments:
Maybe we should have watched Cocktail.
I don't think so.
If Tamannah would have been there , the review would have been different..
Ram, thou art mistaken. Please check my blog correctly before making statements based on other assumptions.
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