Review of Billa 2 – You will B ill-a.

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.