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There’s a surprise entry of a character towards the tail-end of Custody, which is like a hat-tip to Kamal Haasan’s Vikram. The scene kind of breaks the fourth wall–one of those Venkat Prabhu things–because the filmmaker is now just playing to the gallery. Of course, audiences immediately react. It’s fun, but at the same time, it is incongruous. There are many such trademark quirks of the director spread across Custody, which don’t sit well with the sombre tone of the story and the motive of the protagonist. However, it is those quirks that stay with us after the film, because the rest is just a formulaic everyday action story with contrived emotions.
When we first see Shiva (Naga Chaitanya), a small-time police constable, he is seen stopping the convoy of the chief minister Dakshayini (Priyamani) to make way for an ambulance. Dakshayin lauds his action and says that he shouldn’t let even a CM or a PM come in the way of his service to the people. Of course, her lines come back to bite her later. As Shiva grapples with problems in his life, a road accident puts him in an extraordinary situation, which demands him to defy his police force and the government and take the gangster Raju, sorry Razooo (Arvind Swami), in his custody. He has to produce him in the Bangalore High Court in 48 hours while the whole Tamil Nadu force headed by IG Nataraj (Sarathkumar) is on his tail.
Custody doesn’t decide what type of movie it wants to be till the very last scene of the film. A filmmaker, who is known for mocking some of the clichés of Tamil cinema, here resorts to using the same in many instances. Be it the unnecessary songs that don’t help the film in any way despite being the collaborative effort of Ilaiyaraaja and Yuvan Shankar Raja or the flashback sequence that’s introduced to provide a motive for the protagonist, whenever Venkat Prabhu tries to make Custody a normal commercial entertainer, it ends up disappointing.
On the other hand, whenever the director is in his zone, things get pretty enjoyable, like the characterisation of Razooo. His sarcasm and Arvind Swami’s adequate performance are some of the few redeeming factors of the film. A character, at gunpoint, delivers emotive lines about truth, and Razooo says something to the tune of, “Idhellam edhukku solikkitu irukaaru? (Why is he blabbering all this now?)” Custody needed more of this than things like a forced situation that comes out as an excuse for a song. The tone of the film thus ends up being as inconsistent as its Tamil dubbing. Naga Chaitanya and the lead actors have put in a lot of effort in making the film a true blue Tamil-Telugu bilingual. But, when it comes to the songs and the dialogues of the peripheral characters, we are only looking at a Tamil-dubbed Telugu film.
This is not the first time Venkat Prabhu has tried to blend some serious tropes with his trademark humor. He pulled off such a cocktail effortlessly with Saroja. The problem with Custody seems to be that, unlike the director’s sophomore film, this has to fit in a commercial hero amidst all things wacky. Or maybe, this is an attempt of the director to break the mould that traps him, but it has come at the cost of the movie lacking the trademark originality of the filmmaker.
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