Kappal (Ship) - Laugh riot (with some caveats)!

Looks like ‘running a tight ship’ doesn’t seem to be a fun thing for debutant director Karthik G. Krish. He has spiced his first movie with equal doses of slacky and whacky elements. How serious can you get with small time stars like Vaibhav, Venkat Sundar, Karunakaran and ‘VTV’ Ganesh around, performing their roles with an absolute liberty to do anything on screen that might ignite laughter and fun.

The core story of ‘Kappal’ has been etched out partially from last year’s sleeper hit, ‘Endrendrum Punnagai’ where a bunch of guys swear by their names to never get married in life and if at all they would, then all of them would be tying the knot to the same girl - so that’s the sort of whackiness in the script I’m talking about (and inevitably the difference between the two films). Among the moronic bunch, Vaibhav craves for a girlfriend and in a quest to find a partner for himself, he dodges his friends and lands in Chennai. He also succeeds in wooing an ultra rich girl whom he can only dream of. The rest of the story deals with Vaibhav’s gang knowing of his romance and finding ways to foil it. What happens at the end is anybody’s guess, given the cliched nature of such films.

The movie draws its strength from it’s whacky presentation as I mentioned before. It also draws equal flac when the same presentation is made to look serious in its latter half when friends turn foes to disrupt Vaibhav and Poonam’s romance. The heroine falling for the hero at the drop of a hat (anyway we have been conditioned to accept it, so no complaints), friends turning foes was expected, but then turning again as friends in a period of a song and a few hardly constructed emotional moments were some of the many hard-to-digest loopholes. The plot points were laughable, but the laughter would hardly last for that frame, after which we can hardly remember for what we laughed.

Songs were absolute speed breakers, impeding the proceedings time and again. A neo-age fight that involved extensive use of explicit language (of course censored) was interesting. Also the movie tried to spoof popular cinematic elements like a Mani Ratnam movie’s dialog and leaning on a famous song like ‘oora vittu ooru vanthu’ for it's saleability were cliched but quite enjoyable. In total this movie would prove to be a safe bet at the box office for Shankar’s production house that has made a comeback after a brief hiatus.

Verdict: Watchable (quite laughable too!)

Rating: 2.5 / 5