Jango Movie Review

In 2015, we had Indru Netru Naalai, an inventive and fun film that succeeded in Indianising a high concept which is quite a popular one in Hollywood movies time travel. Six years later, now, we have Jango, which tries to do the same with another popular high-concept genre in Hollywood — time loop! In these films, a character gets stuck in a particular time frame, say, a day, and goes through the same day every time they wake up, with everyone around them doing the same things that they did the previous day! And they have to figure out a way to stop this so that things can return to normal.

But in Jango, for the first 40 minutes, it feels like it is us, the audience, who are in a time loop. Bland actor. Terrible comedy. Painful romance. Repeat. This is how these portions go, and we feel trapped. Agreed, director Mano Karthikeyan, a debutant, is merely setting up the plot in these portions, but is it too much to ask for something that feels organic and involving?

Here, the plot revolves around Gautham (Satheesh Kumar), a brilliant neurosurgeon, who is trying to woo back his estranged wife Nisha (Mirnalini Ravi), who works in the TV media. Their romance is what will provide the impetus for Gautham to try and make sense of his situation, so you would expect it to be endearing or at least something that we care about, right? But here, we get a generic falling-in-love montage song. 

With the leads lacking any chemistry, Gautham and Nisha always feel like acquaintances rather than lovers. And the reason why they split up is not portrayed effectively. So, when the film begins with Gautham's attempts at wooing Nisha back, all we get are a whole bunch of comedians who are unfunny and a lot of slapping!

And then, Gautham gets stuck in a time loop, and the film becomes somewhat bearable. As realisation dawns on him that he might be living in the same day every day, he learns that someone is out to kill Nisha and tries to track down the murderer with help from his cop friend Krishnamoorthy (Karunakaran, the only actor in the film who puts up a semblance of performance). 

We get a mystery involving alien spaceships, artificial hearts, scientists having a bad hair day, bad cops and these definitely feel better than everything that came before. We even readily look past the conventional plotting and the narrative and character inconsistencies. At one point, a scientist, played by Hareesh Peradi, is called Stephen Hawking's protege, and he talks about the impact that a meteor hit might have on the city. Later, we see him creating artificial organs. Is he a theoretical physicist or an inventor? The concept and Ghibran's score, over-the-top by design, make us overlook the randomness in the writing.

On the whole, Jango is the kind of movie that has a killer concept that more or less salvages everything else in the film. bad writing, vacant performances and flat visuals.