Actors who attain the pinnacle of fame tend to fumble in finding projects which challenge them. Suriya is at a place where he needs to flex his performing muscles. But the scripts he is choosing betray his aspirations.
Retro is a kind of blinkered joke on itself. It thinks it is ultra-cool, as it doesn’t know any better. The idea behind the project — and I can only make a guess as to why anyone would make a film so lame, almost like a Himesh Reshammiya project, gone South — is to blindside all logic, and deliver a punch that would leave Suriya’s fans agape, or maybe aghast?
Writer-director Karthik Subbaraj flips the traditional family equation of Tamil cinema into something sinister and botchy. At his wedding, Paari (Suriya), a product of low-life proclivities, chops off his foster father Thilagan (Joju George, wasted between the rant and the grunt)’s hand.
The battle between Paari and Thilagan is reminiscent of what we saw transpire between Kamal Haasan and Silambarasan in Thug Life, except for the fact that Joju George’s Thilagan is sleazy and sneaky and vicious in the way Kamal Haasan could never be. There is no room for subtlety in Retro.
From these early beginnings of internecine violence, the screenplay ferrets something so grotesque, it feels like an intentional slur on all conventional commercial trappings. Somewhere during the playing time, the plot moves to an island where Paari’s ex-wife Pooja Hegde (makeup-less and soul-less) is an animal lover in a land of deer hunters.
In another corner of the island, an ugly avatar of a medieval gladiator stages vicious fights in arenas which have seen ‘batter’.
I thought I was watching a mash-up of three films, all equally awful. No, make that one slightly better than the other two: Suriya trying to win back his wounded wife is a theme that shows promise, alas, drowned in mounds of senseless muck and ritzy mayhem.
Hell, what is all this about? It makes no sense. Is it even meant to? Retro tries to be smart, sassy, and cool in a splashy ditzy way. But it is a monstrous misfire from Subbaraj, who had a track record of successes, until recently when he has made a career of boo-boos.
Retro is a project bursting at the seams with slinky missteps. It wants to be a whimsical exploration of patriarchal animosity and eternal love, with lots of animals, both human and four-legged, thrown in for good measure. It ends up as an absolute negation of all good taste, and an invalidation of star power. Sure, we want to see Suriya in something unexpected. But not something so grotesque that it feels like a punishment for the actor and the audience.
Suriya’s character in Retro doesn’t smile. Neither do we while watching it.
