After marriage and O2 Nayanthara must do some career re-think

A month before her marriage, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan ’s first release was Mani Ratnam ’s  Guru , one of the finest films of her career. A week after her marriage, Nayanthara ’s release 02 is arguably the worst film of her career.

Sloppily written and slapdash in execution  02  initially made me perplexed, then annoyed and finally angry for being what it is. A rancid piece of cinema with a message thrown in to make the end-product look more palatable to a  more discerning audience. Not that even the most diehard Nayanthara fan would be able to sit through this…this….whatever it is.

Thriller? Sorry, no thrills. A survival story? Could be, though be warned: I was barely able to survive the ordeal. Like the motley cartoonish characters in the film. I  was left gasping for breath as the story went from bland to adverse to worse.

Initially, I was happy to see Nayanthara play Parvathi a mother to an 8-year-old child Veera (YouTuber Rithvik). Not too many leading actresses in India would want to play mother to a  growing son especially so soon after marriage. But wait. Before we whip out the hosannas, the film loses its plot to the bulldozer of mediocrity when Parvathi must travel with her son by road from her hometown Coimbatore to  Kochi.

The bus ride is no Bombay To Goa for sure. Filled with shady passengers each with an axe to grind (rusty and ineffectual)  the busload seems to feel like an episode of Office Office when all the officegoers have decided to take a break from work for a journey that turns out to be more bumpy than enjoyable.

The great pleasure of watching ‘Lady Superstar’ Nayanthara (I was pleased to note that the epithet has been eliminated this time) soon evaporates as she is faced some serious seemingly insurmountable problems, and that includes a script that supports no actor, big or small. Instead, it seems to be on its own road trip.

Once the bus, spoiler ahead, plunges deep below the ground after a landslide,  the characters in the bus begin to behave like zombies in a Korean film. The actors seem to have been briefed to express grief in dumb-charade motions. There is a cop on board played by Bharath Neelakandan whose grimace could set off a coal burner without the coals.

While one cop on the bus gets real lowdown and dirty another cop outside, this time a female keeps shouting. ‘We must do this.’

I am not too sure her motivational shouts help the film. Back in the sunken bus, the actors breathless act certainly left me gasping for breath:  is our cinema actually capable of such a collective hamminess? More importantly, why did  Nayanthara sign up for this? Debts to pay? A gun on the temple?

Most of the film is shot in a bus with the wrecked interior serving as an unwitting metaphor for the film’s crashing fortunes. Cinematographer Tamizh A Azhagan seems unaware of how to use the cramped space. So he aims and shoots any which he can hoping some footage would hit home.

As if the acting on the bus is not bad enough, there is separate comic relief where one of the bus passengers (Arjunan) gets a lift from a truck driver with a  precocious little daughter who demands Rs 500 from the hitchhiker. I  would also like to demand the same from director G S Viknesh for inflicting this painful survival story on us. Nayanthara deserves much better. We deserve better. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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