Takkar review: Siddharth’s film mistakes silliness for humour, pretentiousness for style

One of the evergreen meet-cutes from Tamil cinema is from Vijay-Jyotika’s Khushi. The two are in a temple watching a physically-challenged girl light an oil lamp, which starts to flicker in the wind once she leaves. Both Vijay and Jyotika rush to save the dying light, and their eyes meet. In Takkar, the first meeting of Gunashekar (Siddharth) and Mahalakshmi (Divyansha) also involves a symbolic fire. But here the fire is from a cigarette lighter that the hero has. As he is about to light his cigarette, Mahalakshmi, ‘Lucky’ for short because she is cool that way, comes out of nowhere to light her smoke. Guna is spellbound, but Lucky walks past him with an ‘attitude’. Director Karthick G Krishna’s Takkar is one of those outdated films where a woman smoking a cigarette is supposed to be modern. To make her look ‘even cooler’, the director makes her smoke a joint. Such a shallow depiction of modernity is omnipresent in this film that mistakes pretentiousness for style.

Gunasekar leaves his village for Chennai in the hope of getting rich quickly. He doesn’t want to die poor like his dad and grandfather. He can’t own a luxury car so he ends up becoming the driver in a luxury taxi service, which offer only Mercedes Benz cars. However, things don’t go his way and he is oft reminded about how he can’t change his financial status by walking the straight and narrow. Hence, when an opportunity shows up, he transforms into Jason Satham’s Transporter and even drives a car a la Statham to help two human traffickers in lieu of money. He is not as clever as the Transporter and gets conned by the kidnappers and is left bruised. After a lot of contrivances and bad writing, we find the hero and heroine eloping in a car with gangsters on their tails. They strike a deal with each other to solve their respective problems, but the inevitable Cupid strikes.

The overarching problem with Takkar is its wannabe nature; even the set design reeks of it. The mansion room of the struggling hero is adorned with a fancy bookshelf and decor. The sight of him getting ready in this bachelor’s mansion and the luxury car parked outside of it is not just incongruous but funny. The depiction of the villains who are supposed to belong to a sketchy neighbourhood is equally facile and silly. As the hero drives through the street, we get to see women and kids getting kidnapped in the background like it’s nobody’s business. The men are all dark in complexion with long hair and beard… you get the drift. And back to Lucky. On top of being modern, she is also Thara local because she dances to Tamil kuthu songs. Be it the father of Lucky, who is forcing her daughter to marry a rich bridegroom or the Asian boss of Guna, who is referred to as ‘Gurkha pasanga’ by modern Lucky, people inhabiting this universe are nowhere close to being real. They are stereotypes, just as cliched as the film’s flimsy one-line story: A rich girl meets a poor boy and learns about life. The poor boy learns money is not everything because of the rich girl. And we learn that Siddharth has made a mistake.

Takkar Movie cast: Siddharth, Divyansha, Yogi Babu

Takkar Director: Karthik G. Krish

Takkar Indian Express Rating: 1 star