Con City Movie Review:
A couple of months ago, a video of an Indian street vendor preparing lemonade went viral. He was seen preparing multiple glasses of juice, squeezing lemon, splitting soda, and cracking ice over the glasses. The peculiar thing about his “performance” was that it looked like he was preparing the drinks fast, but all he did was make cartoonishly jerky movements, trying to give us the illusion of speed, but not in any way that made it believable. Anyway, in a crucial scene in Con City, Arjun Das’ character, an employee at TNEB, finally decides to break bad and forge EB bills. A robotic camera arm zooms about him, there’s slick music, he’s surfing the internet, reading books on the circuitry and mechanics of printers, he’s experimenting with magnets and has his “Eureka” moment. In the next scene, we see him drop a metal ball, tell his colleagues the printer is broken, forge manual bills, and then take the ball out with a magnet at the end of the day. The plan is good enough; it is simple enough, and seeing as how the film is loosely based on real events, it is believable enough, but the stylised lead-up to a simple scene is a problem that plagues the entire film. It reminds us of the viral lemonade vendor. Maybe it would have worked if they hadn’t tried so hard with the presentation?
Director: Harish Durairaj
Cast: Arjun Das, Anna Ben, Vadivukkarasi, Yogi Babu
Con City has all the ingredients for a wholesome family entertainer. We have a motley crew of people, all weathered down by unfair circumstances, finally taking control by banding together to take the system for a ride by orchestrating large-scale scams. The film makes the best use of the ‘found family’ trope, and kudos to director Harish Durairaj for not extracting sappy melodrama with over-the-top romance or family sentiment. Even when Yogi Babu’s character has a heart-to-heart conversation with his mother (played by Vadivukkarasi) at the end, we get a refreshingly minimalistic “Vidu ma paathukkalam,” to wrap it up, instead of putting the veteran actor through a bad wig to wring out a flashback of her feeding her young son, because how else would you know a mother and son had a strong bond? The rest of the script could have used such efficiency.
Con City is bloated with redundant self-serving scenes, try-hard stylisation, and writing choices that it believes are required for a film about financial fraud. At many instances, the film loves presenting itself as smarter than it actually is. Even though it tries hard to move away from the “heist film” tag, Con City relies too much on elements we are familiar with in the heist genre: bad prosthetic makeup, someone bypassing locks with chewing gum, pretending to be a delivery person, almost getting caught, and stopping the police or medical personnel from reaching the scene of the crime by blocking the road somehow. It feels like a good part of the film’s writing seems to have come from an effort to “make it as heist-y as possible.”
Con City also depends on every other character except the primary characters to be extremely easy to scam. I guess that is the foundation of every scam in the real world: gullible people. But, for this to work in a film, the scammer protagonists need to be charming, have enough conviction, or have an end goal that makes us root for them. Except for the final stake, where the crew has to retrieve the child, every other time they take up a life of crime seems to rely on weak reasoning. Crippling debt, being evicted from your house, and a life-threatening illness all seem like good enough reasons to break bad. But, except for the one-percenters, every single person on the planet is facing at least one of these problems, and yet, only a few take the risk of illegal means to solve them. So, how are the primary characters in the film different? How do these ordinary people turn to execute extraordinary crimes? Fine, Con City doesn’t want to be a morality tale or a character analysis, but the central characters in the film have the confidence of someone who was always going to scam anyway. And yet, why is the film trying hard to make us believe that they are common, relatable people?
Right from the beginning, we cannot help but spot several lines or scenes that feel redundant after the fact. Ironically, the film tries to have fun with itself while also trying to present itself as being more complex and intricate than it actually is. While the primary cast members (Arjun Das, Anna Ben, Vadivukkarasi, and Anna Ben) make the writing issues bearable with their performances, Con City could have been a much better film with ruthless script editing.