Dude Movie Review: Heart in the right place, everything else misplaced

SPOILERS AHEAD

It is perhaps easier to hit out at issues like casteism and patriarchy in social dramas than in fun commercial entertainers. Make a handful of wrong choices and the themes get buried or you end up playing down the evils of said issues. Which is why it is impressive to see Dude take some really big swings. Do we really have the freedom to love who we want? Is the sanctity of marriage bigger than love? How exactly does societal pressure work? How far can you go for the person you love? Dude tackles such hard-hitting questions every chance it gets. If only these swings translated to more hits than misses. 

Director: Keerthiswaran

Cast: Pradeep Ranganathan, Mamitha Baiju, Sarath Kumar

After a fantastic cold open that sets up the wacky tone of the film, we are immediately dipped into montage-esque scenes elaborating the friends-to-lovers pipeline of Agan (Pradeep Ranganathan) and Kural (Mamitha Baiju). They’re cousins, friends, she loves him, then he loves her, she doesn’t want him now, then he doesn’t want her now, they both may or may not want each other, someone’s father wants them to end up together, someone’s lover wants them to pretend like they’re together. We are cycled through several permutations and combinations of their relationship status. Keerthiswaran makes it a point to show the impact of the making and unmaking of this relationship with several dedicated crying scenes for both Agan and Kural. He knows how to extract strong performances. Pradeep and Mamitha might bawl their eyes out at tight closeups but it hardly matters, you don’t feel anything because Dude suffers from the biggest tonal inconsistency. Agan admonishes his friend for speaking ill of his (Agan’s) ex. Then, we get a (almost to the camera) monologue about respecting women’s choice and before he even finishes the thought, Agan turns around and pranks someone else.

Scenes bleed into each other, changing tones at will, in rapid successions. You know how when you are scrolling down the Instagram feed, every reel gives you a different emotion? After an hour of doomscrolling, if someone asks what the session made you feel, it is hard to pin down on one emotion because none of the reels leave a lasting impact. Watching Dude feels the same way. This doesn’t mean that the film cuts away quickly. The problem isn’t pacing. The problem is the film's desperation to come off as wacky, cute, and chaotic. “A quip after a serious scene” is a formula that worked wonders for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It works because the tension built up by the serious scene is cut by the quip. In Dude, this doesn’t work because the film is always trying to land a laugh or a quirky mannerism, even in the middle of an important scene. They might have gotten away with it if it was funny or enjoyable. Unfortunately, Dude struggles to draw laughs purely because it is a game of probabilities and the more you try the more your failures pile up and overwhelm the results.

Dude might have failed to engage but you can definitely see a fresh and unique voice, with Keerthiswaran’s visual directorial style. Every character has their own rhythm and energy, everyone is always in motion, which lends itself to a wonderfully chaotic energy on screen. Sai Abhyankkar’s music matches the wacky tone of the film but it quickly gets overwhelming. The background score is trying to overpower the visuals, with its own understanding of the scene. ‘Oorum Blood’ is memorable but Sai needs to understand storytelling as much as he understands music. Mamitha gets to cry a lot but a lot could have gone wrong if she had chosen to give a less involved performance. Pradeep, on the other hand, brings his signature energy with impressive confidence. Every quirky, sleight-of-hand mannerisms he does, like the phone flip, could have gone wrong with just slightly lower conviction and slightly too much confidence. All that being said, the one who gets to have the most fun in the film is Sarathkumar. It has been a while since we saw the actor on screen with such infectious and playful energy. And then he shifts gears and shows the darker shade of the character in a matter of seconds. If only the film allowed Sarathkumar to push his character a little further, we could have gotten one of the best Tamil cinema villains in recent memory. 

It is not that Dude leaves you with mixed feelings but that you’re not sure what these mix of feelings are. Are we even feeling anything? The only thing we know for sure is that the story and the actors deserved better. The film has a lot of heart and it has its heart in the right place but it doesn’t help if its beat isn’t consistent.