‘Goli Soda 2’ review: the fizz is gone

Goli Soda 2 starts off with a sequence that’s shot in Vikram Vedha-style. Two people – a cop and a suspect – face off each other tensely. A story is about to unfold in flashback mode and the two are looking at each other in earnestness. Ironically, this scene isn’t unfolding in a police station but in an empty cinema hall...and the two ‘actors’ are Samuthirakani and Gautham Menon, who we better know as directors.

Samuthirakani plays Natesan, a pharmacist who is friends with three youngsters in his neighbourhood. They are Shiva, an honest autodriver wanting to buy a car; Oli, who works in an eatery but is interested in basketball; and Maaran, who works for a rowdy. Goli Soda 2 soon sucks us into their stories and dreams, with Oli’s tale being the most charming of the three, and resulting in the gorgeous ‘Pondatee’ number from composer Achu.

Natesan knows all three of them, but they don’t know each other, and therein lies the seed of the storyline. The interval block is quite gripping; the three stories don’t exactly converge, as you’d expect them to, but everyone’s life changes. The autodriver gets insulted, the basketball player’s love life gets disrupted and the wannabe-rowdy is seeking a new life. They all realise that there are people who control their lives...and dreams. Goli Soda 2 is riveting till this point.

And then, the second half kickstarts, and falters almost immediately. A couple of new characters are abruptly thrown into the mix, making the already-crowded screen confusing. The dialogues suddenly get too aggressive, too loud. This is director Vijay Milton suddenly taking the vigilante route and once that happens, Goli Soda 2 never gets back on track.

The performances that won us in the first half suddenly spiral downwards. Samuthirakani, soon becoming a lucky charm as an actor in Kollywood, has a solid role, and even does a neat extension of his ‘drunk performance’ in last week’s Rajinikanth-starrer Kaala, but is let down by some weak writing in the end. Gautham Menon (named Raghavan!) gets a grand introduction, but is used only in a few scenes, as are the heroines. And the three boys – the soul of the film’s first half – seem confused with the turn of events in the last hourt hat sees some unrealistic fights and overtly-loud sequences that is likely to send a chill down the spine of even the makers of Singam 3 and Saamy 2.Surely, Goli Soda 2 needn’t have meandered so much to elicit such a comparison.