Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Chennai 600028 II review: "Hilarious but not on par with the prequel!!!"

It's been a while since I had watched a hilarious Tamil movie & so I was looking forward to one for quite a while. With India winning the Mumbai test in style, I was in a mood to celebrate it with some laid back comedy & that's when my eyes fell upon Venkat Prabhu's "Chennai 600028 II" which had hit the screens last weekend. Since I am a huge fan of his brand of film making,  I decided to check it out. Hopefully this will live upto its prequel which had the audience in splits close to a decade back.


A decade has passed & Father time had caught up with the band of boys who has now become men with family responsibilities. Chennai Sharks still exists as Gopi (Vijay Vasanth) runs the team with new set of players. But the original gang still tries to meet up whenever possible courtesy of Seenu's (Premji) booze parties who had remained a bachelor. Since most of them were henpecked husbands, their wives strongly detested such rendezvous making it difficult for them to have some guy time. However, an opportunity presented itself when Raghu's (Jai) marriage was fixed with Anu (Sana Althaf) in her hometown of Theni. Over there, they meet up with their buddy Aravind who seeks their help to defeat the local champions led by the cunning Maruthu (Vaibhav). Little did they realise that this match was the beginning of their troubles as Raghu's wedding was put into jeopardy.


As mentioned earlier, I have always enjoyed Venkat Prabhu's movies which has a liberal dosage of humour, suspense & thrilling elements. Apart from "Maasu", all his previous ventures had worked with the audience.  He made his directorial debut with "Chennai 600028" which appealed to the audience as we could relate to the equation between the characters & also the thrill of the cricket match. In the sequel as well, he has more or less remained true to the narration format as there are ample humorous sequences but it lacks the zip of the former as we dont root for the characters like before. In the technical department, Yuvan Shankar Raja has provided some decent tracks while Rajeev Yadav's visuals had that rustic feel of the prequel. On the negative, Praveen K L ought to have done a better job with the editing as the 2.5 h movie feels way too long. 

Inspite of the numerous characters, each one is given adequate screen space. Shiva rocks with his one liners & crazy movie reviews while Vaibhav was fantastic (my personal favourite) in the negative role. Jai's character required him to be sober while Premji still evokes laughs along with Vijay Vasanth. The rest of the cast have also done their roles aptly.

Verdict: Chennai is slowly getting back to its feet after the demise of their illustrious CM Jayalalitha & to add to it the fury of Cyclone Vardah, so it is likely that the collections will be hit in the initial phase. However, the positive reviews & success of the prequel should help the movie in the long run. In short, it might not be as entertaining as the first installment but still worth a watch provided you watched the prequel to relate to the humour!!!

Rating: 2.5/5

Regards...Ben


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