Mumbaikar Review: The Writing Does Not Fully Align With Vijay Sethupathi's Skills

Three disparate men who have just arrived in Mumbai with specific goals and another on the verge of quitting the city for good for reasons beyond his control constitute a gallery of perfunctorily interesting characters navigating life on the streets of the megalopolis in Mumbaikar.

The antics of these feckless men - they are all either on the run from someone or running towards something - do not, however, add up to much because director-cinematographer Santosh Sivan's whimsical and well-meaning tribute to Mumbai is way too erratic to hit the high notes with any degree of consistency.

Streaming on Jio Cinema, this direct-to-OTT release is a rigmarole that is as confounding as the city of Mumbai would be to anybody who is still finding his foothold in an urban sprawl that never sleeps. Mumbaikar, which starts out in the daytime, reaches its climax at night when the case of a kidnapped schoolboy keeps a couple of cops, a gang of criminals, the boy's father and sundry other blokes awake.

One middle-aged man (Sanjay Mishra) lands in Mumbai to start a new life as a taxi driver. A young lad in love (Hridhu Haroon) leaves his hometown and reaches the City of Dreams to look for a job in an information technology firm where Ishita (Tanya Maniktala) is the HR head. And a taciturn traveller from Tirunelveli (Vijay Sethupathi) is in Mumbai to fulfil a dream. He aspires to make it big as a gangster.

The job-seeker is hired by Ishita's company but he loses all his certificates when he is mugged in a case of mistaken identity. Talking of mistaken identities, that is a plot device that Mumbaikar resorts to all through its two-hour runtime as one character after another finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not surprisingly, nothing goes right for them - or for the film that they are in.

A jobless Mumbai boy (Vikrant Massey) - he asserts that he is unemployed by choice, not chance - is besotted with Ishita, who reminds him that she isn't a 1980s Hindi film heroine who would brook a stalker and eventually acquiesce to his entreaties.

Mumbai seems to be in the vice-like grip of Prabal Kant Patil alias PKP (Ranvir Shorey), a one-time fish trader who is now a dreaded mafia don with interests in many businesses, including a taxi service that supplies cabs to Ishita's company.

The paths of all these people cross when a gang of criminals deploys the gangster-in-the-making to kidnap a wealthy man's son from a school. He gets holds of the wrong victim and sets off a chain of events that unfold in the course of a single night. For the three outsiders groping for their way in Mumbai, their first day in the city threatens to be their last as all hell breaks loose.

The employment-seeking lover boy rides a cab whose driver, also a newcomer to the city, has no clue where on earth they are going. The mafioso - he knows the city like the back of his hand - is drawn out of his home as a crisis looms and a bunch of goons give him a right royal runaround.

And while the chaos is compounded with each passing hour, the pining-for-love jobless man is instructed by his policeman-uncle Sangram Shinde (Sachin Khedekar) to leave Mumbai immediately. The truculent guy has poured acid in a hoodlum's posterior, and with good reason, and the law is closing in on him.

Elements borrowed from many a genre - slapstick capers, gangster flicks, crime dramas and screwball actioners - are assembled in this messy mish-mash that does not yield the sort of percentage that the makers obviously expect from it. The film flits from one thing to another - the editing does not help matters - and often loses its way in a sea of incoherence.

Vijay Sethupathi's first Hindi film, Mumbaikar does nothing to eclipse what the versatile Chennai-based actor achieved in the Amazon Prime web series, Farzi. A poster of the Rajinikanth starrer Kaala (seen behind him in one scene) points to the character's essential mental makeup.

However, there is little else in the film that could help the audience understand the character's motivations. Sethupathi does his very best to deliver some moments of mirth, but the writing does not align fully with his skills. The screenplay does not allow him to ever go beyond half tilt.

Mumbaikar has at least two other veteran actors of proven mettle - Sanjay Mishra and Sachin Khedekar. They, too, suffer the consequences of being trapped in a script that does not volunteer enough information about where they have come from and why they are up to what they are up to.

Vikrant Massey, Tanya Maniktala and debutant Hridhu Haroon go through motions with varying degrees of success. Haroon, amid all the pandemonium, gives a good enough account of himself for the audience to want to see more of him.

Coming from Santosh Sivan, a filmmaker with no mean track record, Mumbaikar is a disappointment, a tepid caper film that fails to hit its straps.