Mafia

This amateurish bundle of footage makes you search for aspirin even before the end credits roll. Karthik Naren confesses in every interview that he looks up at Hitchcock, Nolan & Mani Ratnam as his inspiration. Right from frame one the director's urge to copy the making style from the west was evident. A cliche story, with one dimensional characters having no backstory and pathetic cast (except Arun Vijay and Prasanna) makes this less than 2 hour film tiresome. Every character in the movie was Karthik Naren. They are immodest and full of conceit and never fail to speak in English with little Tamil words sowed in between. Except shooting with guns, the characters have no role to play. The scenes were theoretically narrated instead of showing them visually. To top it all no movie in any region would have used slow motion this bad as in Mafia. The film's content was insufficient to even shoot a short film. Arun Vijay and Prasanna can proudly treasure this as their showreels. The climax twist gave no excitement as the time was already wasted. Mafia is indeed a failed attempt (rather a spoof) in mimicking Hollywood style crime thrillers. May be the unanimous praise for the director's earlier attempt D16 made him think like other commercial directors that audience will graze whatever you feed. The movie is the work of an immature director who has to learn making original films leaving aside his inspirations. 2 stars. 1 for Arun Vijay and 1 for Prasanna.

Movie has a good engaging story and style of direction of a Gautham Vasudev movie but the screenplay lacks the punch for the story could have been better. The last action sequence looks quality less. Cinematography looks good and also the ending to give a sequel is also a good twist. Acting of Prasanna was cool until the end due to the lack of screenplay there are some brilliant moments in the movie to show us villian class

Before watching this movie , I have watched it's "Teasers" and some interviews of Karthick Naren ( Director of this film ) and also I have watched Dhuruvangal pathinaaru, his previous film. After doing all this, I kept my expectations higher. And the movie begins with an action scene in some multi storey building, as the action sequence builds up over a staircase , the camera angle changes to Top angle and moves downwards through the gap between steps and also the camera simultaneously rotates.... OK all I want to say is that it gives us some sort of illusion. Keeping this in my mind, I'm going with the flow of the film. And our protagonist is Aryan (Arun Vijay) working under the Narcotics control Bureau struggles to catch the head of the drug dealer's network after trying so many methods to find him, but these are all shown to us in a manner of some voice overs and some comic relief scenes. He is also in a relationship with his fellow teammate Sathya (Priya Bhavani Shankar). And the film also has very many buildups for the Antagonist(FOR CHAPTER 1) named DK(Prasanna) and also we get an introduction scene for DK same as the introduction scene for the Protagonist. As the story folds up Aryan loses two of his persons who knows the details of DK and one of the dead leaves the total details of DK. With the help of these details and some fieldwork of Aryan and his teammates, whether they are able to catch DK ??? This is the plot and that has a major twist at the climax. After watching the film,I had a different scenario which had never happened before...because, the film seems to be very short but it is elongated. What I want to say is that the film has a story which could be told within half time of its screenplay but it is elongated to get their predetermined run time or they wanted to make it as a "Two or multi chapter film". Although it has a very little story to tell us ,they can at least add some more scenes about the failures faced by Aryan in search of DK, instead of making a movie which takes place in a 5 days screenplay pattern. Or they could have made some more cat and mouse game between those two main characters before reaching climax which would have satisfied their motive of creating sequels of movies or may be a "Franchise" (the director's view on this film) and also satisfied us. We can wish anything, but what we got is a simple story OR Half story of an "unknown film" which is elongated by with numerous glorification scenes of the two main characters and by a series of action set pieces with "ultra slow motion". After these thoughts, I thought that the "illusion shot" (as I pre-mentioned at the beginning of the review) meant to be the illusion of the "Short film being projected as a Feature film" OR it may indicate the illusion experienced by the protagonist ( at the climax), btw who knows :-) I would not say it is a very bad film, but it could be made better by improving the writing area of the film. The film also had many well shot closeups and also closeups on action sequences which is not that good. Colour gradients are used well to indicate the intense situations and the difference between the two main characters. While talking about background score which is good and special mention about the cow-boy kinda theme music during the revelation of the character of Aryan. And so finally, I may or may not be wrong about my views of the film. But I would not say it is a bad film before it's sequels get released.

Its a disappointment if you go with the expectation of D16 from Karthik Naren. Lucky that this movie doesnt have much Love-Sentiments scenes, However this movie is filled with lots of slow motion repeated shots which is a big turn off.

Runtime is around 2 hours, however the movie content is only about an hour. 1 hour is added due to extensive use of Slow motions in every scenes.

Apart from the last 15 minutes, nothing goes interesting in this. Story, Dialogues, Acting is totally boring. Not a bit of Karthik Naren touch in this. Not even one casting went good. Arun vijay exists with his pale face and slow motion of him walking, holstering gun, loading and unloading gun, takes 5 minutes to say one simple dialogue. Prasanna is not upto the mark for a Mafia boss, even with suits, cigars, smokey scenes no impressions created. Priyabhavani Shankar - no comments, no idea why she is in this movie.

Even if you go with low expectations, you wont enjoy the movie. This is just a chapter one, atleast some interesting story line only generated in this movie on the climax. Hence I really hope Chapter 2 will be better than Chapter 1

5 out 10

I think this film total footage duration is 1 hour they stretched upto 2.30 hours with slow motions. No noticable plot twists at all. Easy guessings. Background Music is the only thing which make us can't sleep in this movie. Second part gonna come 😂😂😂 all the best for next film naren.