100 movie review: Atharvaa gets a lot of character build-up, which could have been avoided.
100 movie cast: Atharvaa, Yogi Babu, Radha Ravi, Hansika Motwani
100 movie director: Sam Anton
100 movie rating: 2 stars
Can Tamil directors, once and for all, come up with a film that doesn’t have sexual harassment cases involved? Is it that tough to write stories without referring to Nirbhaya, Pollachi issue, the infamous Nungambakkam murder, and so on? Those who follow Tamil cinema releases closely know what I am talking about. Cop stories have been the safest stock for filmmakers to invest in. Enough has been written and spoke about these, but Sam Anton’s cop film is majorly set in a police control room.
The premise is interesting as the audience gets to know the happenings of a police control room and how it functions. I loved it as an idea. But this needs work as Sam Anton often shifts his focus off the story. His inconsistent storytelling, in particular, during the first half tests your patience, and in return, we get a meet-cute love scene, songs and slow-paced action sequences.
Sathya (Atharvaa) dreams of getting groundbreaking cases to handle but ends up in an operator room, attending calls. He isn’t a fan of such ‘easy jobs’, and laughs at his girlfriend Nisha (Hansika) when he finds her working at a call centre. In the beginning, a couple of kids call the control room saying their school had a bomb threat. Sathya gets tired of answering prank calls and waits for a real phone call that would change his life. And, that happens. Sathya tracks down how a teenage girl was allegedly murdered. Further, this leads to complications, and also, we get a parallel track to the story, a drug-peddling gang.
Sam Anton takes too many cinematic liberties with 100, giving us an unrealistic twist that one can’t easily buy. But he does set things up well in the initial scenes. Atharvaa gets a lot of character build-up, which could have been avoided. Radha Ravi plays pistol Prabhakaran, a senior officer, who never had the chance to use his gun. I really found the whole angle unconvincing.
Hansika barely has anything to do in the film, and eventually disappears in the second half, like most of the ‘commercial’ heroines. Pardon my generalisation, but that’s how it is. In an interview, Sam Anton had told the female characters in 100 were as important as the hero. Sigh; they were anything but.
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