Dev Is A Pointless Boring Love Story

Dev(Tamil)

Staring Karthi, Rakul Preet Singh

Directed  by Rajath Ravishankar

Rating: * ½ (one and a half stars)

After plodding through a plot that crawls at  a snail’s pace , I was left wondering why anyone ever  thought the  audience would want to  invest  2 and a  half hours in a ‘roam-calm’  that’s more ‘roam’ and less ‘calm’.

Dev  moves  restlessly all  over the place, and finally gets nowhere.

For most of  the  film’s running time the lead pair is shown running from pillar to post looking for ways to liven up their privileged  lifestyle. Dev, played by  Karthi, is  essentially an entitled wastrel living off his father(Prakash Raj)’s wealth. He falls  in love with Meghnaplayed by Rakul Preet Singh, a severely limited actress who has  a charming  personality but little else  to recommend herself to the   profusion of projects that come her way.

Singh plays an  entrepreneur with  a serious concentration problem. She runs around pretending  to be busier  than  she actually is, looking for love in pokey  places….like the social media. Just why  a woman so successful and  reasonably attractive would agree to date a man who does  nothing except hang around with his two  best friends ,one male and  the  other female(gender equality thereby gets  evenly  apportioned) .The two  besties  have nothing to do except  make orgasmic noises  about everything that Dev  says and does.

For a long long time I wondered what the  point of making this film is. Most of the playing-time goes in  Dev trailing, wooing courting and singing to Meghna. So okay,is this film a vehicle  and a pretext to blare Harris Jayraj’s  trying-so-hard-to-be-cool songs?Looks like it. As  Karthi and Rakul break into a jig on any and every occasion in  exotic  locations where for some weird reason, The locals  dance with the  lead pair.

 But trust me,  the songs are not a  distraction. Because there is nothing to be  distracted from. Dev is  a painfully routine  love story designed to play up the lead pair’s star-power. Karthi’s character  is specially  self-indulgent. He is shown as a wastrel, but by choice. If he wants he can prove himself a genius  to his doting  father.  And Dev has  his morals in place. During an early song he is clearly seen  saying no to a firangi chorus as she hits on  him.

The chorus girl tries  to look disappointed. But it  comes out more as relief.The kind we experience  when this  ordeal of  a film finally ends.

That comes much later. For now Dev is shown rescuing a well-groomed  rich-type  of a  girl from a gang of  wannabe rapists and then  lecturing her on  how one must never impose oneself in a relationship.

This  is the same  guy who befriends  the heroine on the social media.

Awesome. What do we say about a long dreadfully disinteresting film where the hero’s father and the heroine’s mother  played  by  the redoubtable Prakash  Raj and RamyaKrishnan have more potential as  characters than the lead? I’d like to see a love story between the  two parents.

 But wait .Am I wishing  for a sequel to this plodding rom-com? I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

A big disappointment  from Karthi who showed so  much promise in the Telugu  filmOopiri. He must  stop trying to  bulldoze his way into the masala route.Macho-giri andnacho-giri are best  left to lesser actors. Karthi should  pick projects that have something to say.Dev has nothing to say.And it says it with no pleasure.