If you are from a country which was once colonized by Britain and if you felt sad for Queen Elizabeth’s recent death, you might sync well with the complicated emotion behind Prince.
The story revolves around Anbu (Sivakarthikeyan), a school teacher who bunks classes to watch films. A British woman, Jessica (Maria Ryaboshapka) becomes his reason to be back in school with full attendance.
Anbu’s father (Sathyaraj) is a progressive man who urges his son to love a girl outside of their caste and religion. However, he is against their love as he is a staunch patriot who hates the British for enslaving Indians.
The film touches upon colonialism, patriotism, and discrimination based on caste, class and religion, all while being quirky cracking lame jokes.
It raises questions on love at first sight, war and humanity. However, it goes past them casually, for it doesn’t take itself too seriously and also urges us not to.
Right from the first scene, Prince registers that it is not here to take any heavily opinionated stands, rather just explore the absurdities and the silliness of a British-Indian couple’s love story.
The sequence where Sivakarthikeyan explains his patriotism in the funny Varuthapadatha Valibar Sangam style and the cheeky digs at his own super hit lyricals like ‘Gumuru Tappara’ and ‘Halamathi Habibo’ from Beast works well.
The film is simple with its ambition to deliver a full-length comedy flick, nothing more or less.
The actor-director duo try to do what they intend — coherently stitch a bunch of comedic sketches in the pretence of telling a substantial story just like their previous hilarious works, Sivakarthikeyan’s Doctor and Anudeep’s Jathi Ratnalu.
However, in Prince, despite the tremendous opportunity to delve into different kinds of humour, especially with such an off-beat premise and world full of weird characters, it predominantly relies just on the dialogue delivery.
It does work at many places with an embarrassingly silly setup but falls flat in the rest, letting the audience have some chuckles instead of a laughter riot.
Thaman’s music and Sivakarthikeyan’s terrific dance moves do all the heavy lifting for Prince while the screenplay is lazy.
Maria shines in her Tamil debut. Actors Sathyaraj, Soori, Anand raj, Sathish and Youtubers Rahul and Bhaarath perform adequately. Manoj Paramahamsa’s brilliant cinematography is quite evident through the vibrant visuals.
Sivakarthikeyan isn't yet another star. Coming from a non-filmy background to becoming a popular standup comedian, a celebrated television host to a huge star, he is the perfect embodiment of ‘Zero to Hero’ transformation and an inspirational icon for thousands of youth who have nothing else in hand but talent.
And hence, considering him as a role model and watching him as a fan barely meeting his own standards is not satiating enough.
Not that Prince isn’t good. It has interesting elements and does make you laugh at times, but just that it feels like a film that would have worked better had it come a few years back when he was still not the big thing he is today. Unfortunately, he has set his bars high.
The bilingual film, Prince is running in cinemas now.
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