Revolver Rita Movie Review:

The world revolves around trends nowadays. One of them starts a trend in one part of the world, and soon enough, people from random corners of other parts of the world jump on the bandwagon. And when these take the form of videos, it becomes a different beast altogether. Imagine you are scrolling through these trendy videos, seeing their virality, and more importantly, the attention the people featured seem to be getting. Attention is one of the oldest drugs in town, and everyone wants to be at the centre of it. Nevertheless, you want the attention, and you believe your video could be the next big thing. You think for a day or two, and then finally, decide to hop on to that trendy bandwagon. Unfortunately, by then, there is a new trend in town, and the others on that bandwagon are looking at you oddly. That’s what has happened with Keerthy Suresh’s latest, Revolver Rita, which is yet another dark comedy that comes at a time when the genre seems to have run its course in Tamil cinema.  

The film opens with two ‘sambavams’ and if the voiceover wasn’t enough, we also have the word ‘Sambavam’, of course, in yellow, plastered all over the screen. There is a suicide, and a murder, and that’s how, almost a couple of decades later, the lives of four and a half women get caught in the crossfire between the gangs of Reddy (A terrific Ajay Ghosh) and the father-son duo of Dracula Pandian (Super Subbarayan) and Dracula Bobby (Sunil). Oh, throw in a lecherous cop named Kamaraj (John Vijay), an equal parts bumbling, irritating, and childish gang member (Redin Kingsley), a pimp (Suresh Chakravarthy), and a group of killers for hire, who want to make a quick buck. Now, if this motley group doesn’t scream dark comedy, then what else will? Every piece is in place, and they are played by actors who are quite decent at their game, and yet, the writing never brings them all together cohesively.

The four and a half women consist of Rita (Keerthy Suresh), her mother Chellamma (Radikaa Sarathkumar), Rita’s sisters (Gayathri Shan and Akshatha Ajith), and her one-year-old niece. Just as Rita labours through her own problems, including a drunk and dowry-hungry brother-in-law named Gowri (Blade Shankar), and a past incident with Kamaraj… a dreaded and horny gangster with a bounty on his head, walks into their house during a birthday celebration. One revolver and one pressure cooker later, the party turns into a nightmare, and all hell breaks loose. Now, you might not be mistaken to think this has all the ingredients for a delectable dark comedy. But Chandru has overstuffed the pot, and for some reason, thinks he has to spoonfeed every little detail to the audience by having his characters speak reams and reams of dialogue. This doesn’t work for the film at all, and the repetitiveness adds to the problems of Revolver Rita, the primary being the film’s own confusion between wanting to be a Kolamaavu Kokila redux and trying to be its own thing. 

A goofy family caught in the crosshairs of dreaded gangsters is something Nelson dished out with perfection in his Kolamaavu Kokila and even Doctor. Revolver Rita has similar tropes, and tries its best to find humour in unlikely places, but takes a long time to get there. A dark comedy generally works wonders when the characters aren’t in on the jokes, and it is their reactions to incredulous situations that are milked for humour. This genre also is often richly bolstered by the music, and Sean Roldan tries to do the same, but one can only enhance what is already there.

But Revolver Rita revolves too much around wordplay, and long-winded monologues to try to convince us of its goofiness amidst high stakes. If these portions even remotely work, it is because of the over-the-top and almost caricaturish turn of Radikaa. Her one-liners in some really dark moments, like her conversations with her dead husband, are a hoot. Unfortunately, Rita is too one-note, and Keerthy isn’t allowed to let her hair down in this role. Her stardom comes in the way, and she has one too many hero moments that dilute the tension. Sunil, with his bloodshot eyes, plays the trigger-happy Bobby with a lot of rigidity, but he feels wasted in a role that only asks him to grunt around and exist in this madcap ride with a lot of potential. Redin does what he always does, and it is painful how every iteration is becoming more irritating than the previous one. The one other saving grace in the film is Ajay Ghosh’s Reddy, who gets the assignment right, even if everything else goes wrong for his character.  

With so many characters involved in the film, it takes too long to take off, and by the time it does, Revolver Rita requires us to do the heavy lifting to stay engaged with the film. Even if we do, the returns aren’t that great, but the second half has some interesting portions involving the ensemble. The conversations between Reddy and the killers are quite funny, and so are the scenes involving Rita’s family and one of the killer-for-hire in a dilapidated factory. Of course, there is a lot of convenience, and it could have been forgiven if the narrative were richer by it. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Also, because there are so many subplots in the film, Keerthy’s Rita is completely sidelined in the second half. For a long time, there is nothing that she does, and even when she does something incredibly heroic, it feels out of place and shoddily staged. In theory, these ideas would have felt terrific, but the implementation… not so much. Case in point, a slow-mo scene where she slides in a chair to the center of the frame, or the scene involving the police station and a weapon of mass destruction. Keerthy tries to channel her mass avatars in these scenes, but they end up being good examples to show how mass isn’t just centred on the aura of the star, but also in the writing of the scene. 

With competent artillery and just enough ammunition, Revolver Rita definitely fires on all cylinders, but only a handful come even close to the target, and one just wishes that the weapon was held with a firmer grip simply because it ends up as a chaotic misfire.