Gangers Movie Review: Vadivelu-Sundar C’s relentless efforts keep this chaotic film afloat

Gangers isn’t flawless but it still entertains you because it promises a typical Vadivelu-Sundar C commercial entertainer and it delivers that with flawless unadulterated and focused intent

Sundar C's Gangers is best enjoyed as an elaborate set-up for Vadivelu's gags. Most of them work, some fall flat, and others are in bad taste but even if you laugh a few times you do laugh the hardest, and that's how the film wins. Sundar C and Vadivelu reunite after decades and they seem extremely aware of the expectations attached to that. At some moments, you can feel the pressure to satisfy the fans stretching out certain comedy tracks, rendering them desperate and unfunny. But the story is an ever-expanding dart board. As every attempt at comedy is thrown at it constantly, it contorts to stretch and expand so something eventually sticks. Gangers even switches genres in the middle to become a heist film, to wring out every wacky humour you can think out of that. Of course, Sundar C's signature masala flavour—with enough family drama and emotional moments to go along with glamour and visually loud fights—is also infused into this vigilante-comedy-heist-drama.

Director: Sundar C

Cast: Sundar C, Vadivelu, Catherine Tresa, Bagavathi Perumal

It wasn't just the return of the Sundar C-Vadivelu combo, many of Tamil cinema's classic comedy tropes make a comeback as well. There is a comedy track around the hero and comedian being constantly mistaken for each other at the misfortune of the latter, there is one about sneaking into a house full of sleeping villains in the night, there is another about the comedian coming up with colourful ways to woo the heroine which ends up working in favour of the hero, and more. A constant unshakeable feeling of familiarity is present through almost every scene in the film, comedy or otherwise. Even as you keep aside the familiar comedy tropes and look at the central story, you have seen this all before. You can feel the ‘twists’ coming a mile away, you know as long as the hero is in the frame the villains cannot hurt anyone, and you know how the hero’s sad backstory is going to end as soon as they show his previously-unseen wife. And yet Gangers still works because despite the familiarity, the film stacks a large number of these ideas one after the other, and with humour acting as an effective connecting tissue, you are comfortably smothered by the sheer volume of storytelling. So, even as there are no novel ideas to bedazzle, you’re pushed from one unserious attempt at a familiar idea to another, at a rate that keeps you from feeling boredom, or anything really. Pretty soon you get comfortable with the rhythm of the film, which is to take wild detours from one idea to another with the only constant being Vadivelu’s humour.

People often look at a film with fast erratic editing and say that it borrows the language of short-form internet videos like Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, to replicate the level of audience engagement. A film like Gangers tells you that perhaps Sundar C is the filmmaker who truly adopted the ‘reel format’ to the big screens. While you are scrolling through your social media feed, you might possibly go from a true crime story to a funny skit, a motivational video, an erotic dance, to a heartwarming story, and a funny skit again. Gangers retains your attention in almost the same pattern. What starts off as a thrilling abduction case turns into a vigilante story, a short PSA on drug use, a heartwarming tale of a teacher getting shoes for the school kids, a revenge drama, a heist story with an unreliable narrator, and a wholesome ending for supporting characters the film never took seriously until that point.

Gangers doesn’t take itself seriously but it does make an earnest attempt to keep you engaged by throwing one idea after another and fortunately, it throws more comedy ideas at you than plot ideas and the comedy works, thanks to Vadivelu. Now, some of these ideas are painfully outdated. There are voyeuristic camera angles, and jokes that are more insensitive than funny, and when these moments hit, it drains the film of all the energy it accumulated until then. It is perhaps a futile attempt to point at the problems and logical mistakes in Gangers because they are loud and conspicuous and yet the entertaining moments outnumber the energy draining moments. Gangers isn’t flawless but it still entertains you because it promises a typical Vadivelu-Sundar C commercial entertainer and it delivers that with flawless unadulterated and focused intent.