Chennai 600028

Gully cricket in Madras ranks somewhere above religion. Kudos to S P Charan and Venkat Prabhu (in that order) for daring to dream about making a movie that has its storyline weaving through this version of the game. Credit must also go to Venkat for getting in so many fresh faces and getting them to look and sound natural. Venkat does a decent job with Chennai – 28, but I wished he’d done better than this.

As a movie trying to define a new genre in Tamil, it is neither here nor there. Promising characters are introduced, but not explored beyond the first few frames. The plot seems all too familiar and the game is captured without enthusiasm. I’ll get to each one of those.

The official website has a great array of character sketches, which literally made me sit up and notice. You should run through the list to see what I’m talking about. Tamil directors, for most part, have never been comfortable dealing with multiple leads; Venkat joins that line. Eleven guys in the team, two girls, the brother of the ‘hero’, a villain and an arch rival team take way too much to deal with, when you’ve got Cricket waiting on the wings. Venkat hurries through the list with a love triangle thrown here and a friendship/loyalty/strength of character tested there. BTW, what were those two girls doing in the movie?

Fine, now you’re thinking, “OK, let’s get to the game then!”. I’ve never seen the game captured in an uninspiring manner as this. The games around the climax, especially, are so amateurishly done. The flood light tournaments that I’m familiar of, from the ones we’ve played in K K Nagar and Adambakkam (St. Thomas Mount) have such an intensity and edginess to them, even watching from the sidelines was a spectacle.

What could have been a great movie, ends up OK. Venkat Prabhu does well where he could have slacked (the 2nd act) and misses where (the beginning and the end) he ought to have tightened the screws on his script.