Film: Boomerang
Director: R. Kannan
Cast: Atharvaa, Megha Akash, RJ Balaji, Sathish, Induja and Upen Patel
Rating: 1.5/5

R Kannan’s Boomerang wants to be a lot of things. In its attempt to pander to the mainstream audiences, it plays out like a commercial potboiler with romance, action and a duet shot in some exotic beach. In order to be taken seriously by the critics and the elite audiences, it plays out like a socio-political thriller while trying to address many things from interlinking rivers to address water scarcity in farming to talking about corporatization; it stirs up almost every recent popular socio-political issue.

In the process, Boomerang ends up neither as a solid commercial entertainer nor a praiseworthy and inspiring socio-political thriller.

The film opens in a hospital and we see a doctor telling a couple that their son, Shiva, has suffered severe burn injuries in a fire accident and that he needs a face transplant. Shiva gets a new identity post the face transplant and we get a scene where he wakes up in the morning and is nearly shocked to see someone else’s face in the mirror. His sister jokes about how she has a better looking brother now. With time, Shiva gets used to his new identity but the biggest shock comes in the form of some men trying to kill him and the mystery behind it is the answer to what happened to the person behind Shiva’s original face.

Through a back-story, we are introduced to Shakti and his big dreams for his village. When we meet Shakti, we see him floor a room full of managers with a flawless presentation, only to be sacked along with his team, a few minutes later. Shakti and his friends decided to go to his village and take up farming, but face stiff opposition from his own family. Shakti’s mission to interlink rivers and encourage people to return to farming doesn’t go down well with some people and a big multinational company which has other plans on its mind.

Boomerang borrows a lot of ideas from a few popular south Indian films. The basic premise of face transplant and taking up the mission of the person who gives him his new identity is borrowed from Telugu film Yevadu.

The entire agriculture angle and the needlessly boring stretch that remind us of the miserable lives of farmers is borrowed from AR Murugadoss’s Kaththi, which also stars Vijay in dual roles just like how Atharvaa plays dual roles in this film.

In commercial cinema, it’s perfectly alright to get inspired and borrow ideas to make films but it is really disappointing when you can’t do justice to the inspiration.

Both Yevadu and Kaththi are good commercial entertainers and Boomerang borrows two exciting ideas from these films and makes a mockery of them in the process. It ends up as a film with big (even though borrowed) ideas which never get translated the way they’re supposed to in order to create the necessary impact.

In Kaththi, Vijay essayed dual roles and we don’t see both the characters display heroism. Murugadoss makes one of the characters really helpless and gives the other a lot of star spotlight, making it a decent entertainer. In Boomerang, both the characters of Atharvaa get their share of heroic moments and we never feel like rooting for any of them.

Among the supporting cast, RJ Balaji has decent screen presence with some politically-charged one-liners. Sathish is mostly annoying with his awkward jokes about women and Megha Akash gets wasted in silly role of a documentary filmmaker who is there for no reason in the film.

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First Published: Mar 09, 2019 13:51 IST