Kannai Nambathey is one of those films which rely on churning out one plot twist after another at the expense of becoming silly and contrived. To call director Mu Maran’s screenplay a mess is an understatement. He comes up with a character for every brick wall and they don’t serve any purpose other than that. Take for instance a character who keeps stalking the lead actors who are trying to cover up a murder. He follows them and keeps taking pictures all through the film, but he doesn’t get a proper closure. The purpose of the character is just to take those pictures for someone to blackmail the hero because the director wants to maintain some stupid suspense. This film teems with such misdirections. Our directors need to be told that holding back all the information and revealing it in the end as one big surprise is not the meaning of suspense, it is just lazy writing. This has been the case since Karthik Subbaraj’s Pizza, from where Kannai Nambathey derives a lot of its inspirations — even a song is a complete rip off of Santhosh Narayanan’s "Engo Odugindrai". Here goes an attempt at unraveling the mess of a story: Arun (Udhayanidhi Stalin) is desperately in search of a house because his house owner has found that his tenant is in love with his only daughter and wants him out of the house in a day. So, Udhay settles for sharing a house with Ilamaran (Prassana), who will be vacating the place soon. Arun, Ilamaran, and Arun’s friend (Sathish) quickly end up becoming friends. They all leave together to have a drink at a bar, and Arun steps out to take a call. That’s when he witnesses an accident, where a lady crashes her car into a roadblock and is unable to drive. Arun agrees to drop her back home, a mistake that leads to him getting trapped in a maze of problems. Latest reviews: Zwigato | Rocket Boys Season 2 | Shazam! Fury of the Gods | Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway | Kabzaa | What’s Love Got To Do With It It is one of those typical settings for a thriller, but Mu Maran keeps adding some random backstories, which all get unraveled in a single monologue at the end of the film. The only good thing that came out of the movie is that it was unintentionally funny in many instances. Other than that, there is nothing to relish in Kannai Nambathey, which brims with puerile ideas that were once seen in the works of amateur short filmmakers on YouTube. Even they wouldn’t resort to some of the ideas in this film.
