It was an adult comic-action flick that had earned both critical acclaim and commercial success. ‘Delhi Belly’ had struck a different chord with it’s quirky characters, it’s bold audacious dialogues, it’s taut screenplay, it’s fast pace, and slick editing. And now the film comes to Tamil as ‘Settai’.
Directed by Kannan who had earlier remade ‘Jab We Met’ with fair success, this adaptation, however, is a disappointment. The director and his team of screenplay writers, while adapting the Hindi version for Tamil audiences, have totally missed out on the feel and essence of the original. The characters are flat, the comedy is stale and the pace slackens often.
The maker has remained faithful to the original in plotting the incidents and sequences. The film revolves around the misadventures of three guys and two girls, as they inadvertently get involved in a smuggling racket and the underworld. Sharing a shoddy apartment in Mumbai, the trio (Arya, Santhanam, Premgi) work for a Tamil newspaper.
Arya’s fiancee Hansika is an airhostess, while Anjali, who meets the trio later in her line of work, is a journalist with an English daily. Hansika lends the glamour quotient. Anjali, saucy and cool, carries off her glamorous urban look well. It’s the guys who are lacklustre. Arya is just about adequate, and Premgi for some unknown reason very sombre and grave. Santhanam manages to get some laughs, but few and far between. Their lives take a turn when Hansika helping out a friend, consents to deliver a package to someone, not realising that it carried smuggled diamonds and was meant for a thug. She asks Arya to do it, who passes it to Santhanam. The latter suffering from diarrhoea (the ‘Delhi Belly’) hands the package to Premgi, along with a package of his stool sample to be delivered to a doctor. The packages get mixed up, leaving the mobster (a splendid Nasser) furious. The where Nasser reverently spreads a cloth and pours the ‘diamonds’, only to see shit literally flowing, is hilarious. It’s then all about how the thug tries to recover his package and about how the friends try to outwit him.
The earlier version was smartly written, outrageously funny, and imaginative. Wacky and spiced with expletives and cuss words, there was a certain irreverence about it. The remake has been toned down totally. The toilet jokes though have been reprised here. There are too many songs, which distract one, and filter the essence.
Losing out on the flavour and feel, this adaptation is a total let down. A watered down version, it’s just average routine fare.