A disclaimer flashes on screen as the opening credits of Kee roll on and out. Something like, “The adverse effects of technology have been exaggerated for cinematic reasons.” One should have taken the hint then and walked out.
The film opens to a man in a car looking at a couple on the street. The couple takes leave of each other, and he gets on his motorcycle. The man in the car is egged on by a voice from the phone: “Go! Do It! Kill Him”. The car driver tries to resist but to no avail. The voice on the phone directs him, and very soon after the motorcyclist is dead, and news reports speculate about rising rates of road accidents.
As opening scenes go, this is not the worst I’ve seen.
And then we are in a club and flaming sambucas and foaming cocktails and smoke and lights come on, and the film’s star – Jiiva as Sid, walks in and a long spiel about men and women and how to pick up girls in a bar happens.
As follow up to the opening scene goes, this is among the worst I’ve seen.
Sid then does a lot of telling and very little showing about the risks of being online and how he as a hacker knows what women want and can therefore pick anybody up. This includes finding out a girl’s bra size and how much it costs and what make-up she has on. And this is followed by “It’s easy to touch a girl if you touch her heart.”
Puke.
*****
Kee is written and directed by Kalees, and produced by Michael Rayappan of Global Entertainment. The film stars Jiiva, Nikki Galrani, Anaika Soti, Suhasini, Rajendhra Prasad, RJ Balaji, Govind Padmasoorya and about 200 strobe lights. Kee was shot by Abhinandan Ramanujan and edited by Nagooran. It features music by Vishal Chandrasekar
*****
The big plot point of Kee is that there’s a group of powerful cyber criminals led by a man with a hipster beard and muscle tattoos (Govind Padmasoorya) who hack your phones and computers and make you do things you don’t want to. They are so powerful they’ve evaded all law enforcement. But some guy with three mac monitors and an internet connection can break through their firewall on his first attempt.
That’s because this is Sid. And Sid is a hacker par excellence because he told us in the follow up to the opening scene.
And this is really the problem with Kee. It promised a fairly interesting thriller around cyber crime, dark web, and technology and what we got instead was a lot of padding to allow the hero to deliver a single punch to the villain at the climax.
Last year’s Irumbu Thirai also talked about cyber security, identity theft, and a powerful villain who exploited the dark web and gullible people on the internet for his own benefit. And while it had its flaws it at least was credible in its use of technology. And it made the idea of cyber crime relevant and topical to the average man. After all, we live in a world where UIDAI and Aadhaar is wrecking lives and fortunes.
But Kee is not Irumbu Thirai. Not by any means. The scarcely believable villain looks more like the guy who would convince you to take up cross fit and quad core than hack your webcam and get you to go kill random human beings. But we need to know he’s really strong, so let’s just write a random character whose only purpose in the film is to get beaten up by the villain and then sing his praise.
And oh, let’s have two women who seem romantically/sexually interested in the hero because clearly he knows how to touch their heart via their Victoria’s Secret bras. In the list of pointless female roles in Tamil cinema, Nikki Galrani as (I tried really hard to recall if her name was even once used on screen) the hero’s love interest in Kee is the most pointless.
Recommended
And Suhasini. She scowls and cries through the two and half major scenes she is in, as Sid’s mother. One sympathises. She was as necessary to the plot as the police officers we never see when crimes happen regularly in the world of Kee. RJ Balaji has more screen time than Suhasini and the man is merely recycling all his jokes.
The release of Kee was long delayed – for unknown reasons – and I wonder if it would it have been better if it was delayed forever.
*****
The Kee review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.