Review by Subhash K Jha: Murugadoss’ Tamil film is so awful that it makes you feel kindly towards Sikandar, his last fiasco, which was in Hindi. Dil Madharaasi could be in Chinese or Arabic, instead of Tamil.
Crumminess has no language, none that could be observed and absorbed from the outside. Of course, the film is so mired in mediocrity that it forgets the presence of an audience. Dil Madharaasi is like a backfired trial run of a video game staged for potential clients.
The characters seem loosely based on fantasy figures out of a cheap Bhojpuri comic book from the 1970s.
We recently had a Malayalam film, Maareesan, where paedophilia was used as a plot-propelling gimmick. We now have Dil Madharaasi, where dementia drives the story forward. Sivakarthikeyan plays Raghu, a man who suffers from a rare mental disorder after his entire family perishes in a bus accident.
There is an unintentionally funny sequence, straight out of an eek-grade daytime soap, in which Raghu goes from one wounded person to another in a hospital, calling them ‘Uncle’, ‘Aunty’, ‘Sister’, ‘Brother’, etc.
This is Hum Sad Sad Hain. Without Salman to provide the tadka of the chuckle.
There is no comic relief in Murugadoss’ film… Unless we consider the entire film an unintended comic visitation. In that case, Dil Madharaasi is as funny as molar surgery, without anaesthesia. The film moves from one torturous plotting outrage to another with no room for a breather.
From its opening, where an anti-terrorism group led by someone mononymously called “Prem” (Biju Menon, a talent of significant resources here reduced to sloppy sketchiness) combats the archvillain Virat (Vidyut Jammwal).
Designed as a warning against Tamil Nadu’s “gun culture” (how much research has gone into this trigger for the plot?), the narrative never stops being a caricatural version of the Pokémon series, replete with characters who are constantly nudging the fences outside the farce station.
Having sufficiently ridiculed the hero Raghu’s mental state (please note, no one involved in the making of this torture chamber actually knows how ridiculous he is), the film then gets a barrelful of laughter from his persistent suicidal tendencies. Raghu wants to kill himself for the sake of his ladylove Malti, who, like Tiger Shroff’s Alisha in this week’s other release Baaghi 4, seems to have dropped out of sight, though not out of the seriously disturbed Raghu’s mind.
By the time Sivakarthikeyan and Jammwal are ready for a climactic faceoff, we are too severely traumatised and fatigued to care about Raghu and Malti’s love story, which wraps itself around the maelstrom of mayhem like a serpent around an infertile tree.
Murugadoss blamed Salman Khan for the fiasco that was Sikandar. Whom would he like to blame for this monstrous misfire?
