Double Tuckerr Movie Review: A clumsy entertainer with ineffective humour

It is not often that a comedy film begins on a heavy note. As soon as protagonist Aravind (Dheeraj) is introduced into the frame, he and his parents meet with a terrible accident on the way to their hometown. The car catches fire and his parents die while he is left scarred for life, quite literally. He deals with severe self-image issues for life, pushing him to face loneliness for the better part of his childhood. Later, he faces more insults from the people he loves. You expect him to get some respite while getting caught in a comedy of errors, but unfortunately, it only gets worse.

Director: Meera Mahadhi

Cast: Dheeraj, Smruthi Venkat, Kovai Sarala, Yashika Anand, Mansoor Ali Khan, Karunakaran

There are multiple layers to the plot, but it all begins when Aravind’s life is taken by two ‘angels’—animated characters named Left and Right—much before his time on Earth ends. By the time they realise their mistake, his lifeless body is taken away by Rocket (Sunil) and Murder Mani (Shiva Sha Ra). The dominoes keep tumbling as one untoward incident follows another, leading to several lives getting disrupted and caught in the madness—albeit one that lacks any flavour.

Double Tuckerr has some clever ideas and a very interesting premise. If Rajinikanth’s Athisaya Piravi had the God of death and his assistant navigating turbulent waters, here there are two animated characters running around to rectify a mistake that they made. Since only Aravind can see the ‘angels’, we can safely assume that it was a figment of his imagination. It is not a coincidence that the angels are based out of a kid’s scrapbook. A kid that Aravind was very close with since his parents’ death. Left and Right are the centre of the film, and they come to life vibrantly.

Right also turns into famous characters of Rajinikanth, MGR, and Suriya. But they become too overwhelming at one point. The comedy is never fleshed out well and despite them being thrown at us at every minute, the humour falls flat on its face. There are passing references to various popular memes. There is one on police stations garnering rave Google reviews, ‘Arivaliyaga Unargiraar’, 'Cheems’, ‘Boink’, and even actor Simbu’s infamous ‘Oru nimisham sir’ moment. After a point, I stopped counting them as it felt like taking multiple pages out of ‘Textbook on Memes for dummies’ and slamming it on the screenplay in the name of comedy.

Double Tuckerr also promotes some problematic ideas. A character in the film undergoes a gender-affirming surgery to change themselves to evade gangster Raayar (Mansoor Ali Khan) even though they don’t associate with the gender. Insensitive humour is spun from that.

Also, if you think we were done with making a mockery out of mental health patients a decade or two ago, you would be wrong. MS Bhaskar and his friends, who escape from a mental asylum, are employed as terrible plot devices for entertainment.

There is Aravind who is trying to find his body, Vennila and Moorthy (Yashika and Karunakaran) on the run from Raayar, and Rocket and Mani trying to dispose of Aravind's body. Despite weaving multiple story arcs into the screenplay with the intention of culminating in a thrilling penultimate plot twist, each narrative thread remains disjointed and fragmented. The narratives, logic and timelines don’t match and are all over the place. When I breathed a sigh of relief thinking that the clumsy ride was over, the makers teased it with a sequel. It is at that time I realised, that just like the title, the exasperation too was double.