Many years ago, actor Raghuvaran played Mark Antony in Rajinikanth’s Baassha as one of the most iconic villains. Adhik Ravichandran tries to replicate the character in his latest outing, Mark Antony with Vishal and S J Suryah. The film turns out to be neither here nor there, and websites talk of it being comical, I found none laughing. On the contrary, I saw some leave the auditorium 45 minutes into the run time.
Antony (Vishal) and Jackie Pandiyan (Suryah) are best buddies, and gangsters! Together, they control over and rule Chennai. But like all movies in this genre, they create enemies as they go along, and one of them is Ekambaram (Sunil). He wants to murder Antony as a revenge. He had killed Ekambaram’s brother. The plot is to be executed in bar.
Weaving into this murderous mess is Chiranjeevi (Selvaraghavan), who is working on a time-travel mobile phone. He is all set to rewind and correct the past in order to bring his mother back to life. Well, his life is all set to get into a spiral when Antony and Jackie get hold of the magical machine.
Shot in hues of red, Mark Antony is such a hotchpotch of ideas that the narrative structure totters into a heap of nothingness. It is whacky and crazy to the core. And how far can one stretch suspension of disbelief?
Two reasonably good actors like Vishal and Suryah have been utterly wasted with a screenplay that goes berserk. With a handful of audience in the first show that I saw, I wonder what the movie’s fate is going to be in the next few days.
Somewhere, Tamil cinema seems to be slipping from some interesting stuff we have seen earlier. And this habit of trying to experiment with the medium cannot be everybody’s cup of tea. And one of the greatest flaws of Mark Antony is precisely this, and writers and directors must realise that one needs tremendous control over the medium to carry out of an effort like Mark Antony. And pray why drag Shakespeare into this humungous mess?
