Neeya 2 movie review: Why are such films being made in 2019?Neeya 2 movie cast: Jai, Raai Laxmi, Catherine Tresa, Varalaxmi Sarathkumar
Neeya 2 movie director: L Suresh
Neeya 2 movie rating: 0.5 star
In 2019, we get a film where a woman turns into a snake when the sun sets. I am talking about Malar (Raai Laxmi), who claims she was married to Sarva aka Vikram (Jai) in his previous birth. Meanwhile, Sarva gets married to Divya (Catherine Tresa) as she threatens to throw acid on him, jokingly, if he didn’t ‘accept her proposal’.
Divya stalks Sarva and does a role-reversal like any other popular Tamil hero. Sarva keeps ignoring Divya. But she relentlessly pursues Sarva, and one day tells him she also has ‘naga dosham’. They both ‘fall in love’. As a result, Malar takes revenge on the couple. She follows them wherever they go, of course, in the form of a 20-ft snake.
For large parts, Neeya 2 feels staged than filmed, like watching an age-old drama recorded on camera than a film itself. I was damn bored and alarmed at not feeling invested enough, something that hasn’t happened to me, in the recent past, with an ‘animal movie’.
There were speculations about the film being a remake of the Kamal Haasan-starrer Neeya, but in an interview, the director had said his intention wasn’t to remake the cult classic but revealed Neeya 2 shares a lot of similarities with the core plot.
Everything that happens in Neeya 2 is connected to vidhi (fate), jaadhagam (horoscope) and parihaaram (remedies).
In a year that has seen a bunch of good films including Super Deluxe and several more, Neeya 2 is an eyesore that should never have released.
Why are such films being made in 2019? Who cares about a shape-shifting serpent that doesn’t belong to this century?
For a film that sets itself around a mythical character, Neeya 2 suffers from a dire dearth of imagination. It works typically as a bloated drama that stretches its own limits of absurdity scene-after-scene.
The 20-ft serpent in the film does action scenes like the snake that appears in the Mudhalavan song. Unfortunately, Neeya 2 ends up as an outrageous mess that is hard to sit through.
It is time for Jai, Catherine Tresa, Raai Laxmi and Varalaxmi Sarathkumar to invest in good scripts and filmmakers instead.
