Film review 'DAGAALTY': A weak script that hardly offers anything

 His latest outing, Dagaalty, with debutant director Vijay Anand, doesn’t take him anywhere closer to his target. In fact, it looks like, the actor is setting a path for himself that could only worsen his career graph.

The trailer of Dagaalty created curiosity with its one-liners as that tickled the funny bones. Only after watching the film, we realise that the film hardly has any fun moments, which Santa is known for. In the very scene, we are introduced to Vijay Samrat (Tarun Arora), an arrogant industrialist, who has the habit of sketching portraits of unknown young girls. He paints one and asks his henchmen to track down the girl in the painting to feed his carnal desire. In fact, he offers a whopping Rs. 10 crore for the person who traces her whereabouts. In the very next scene, we get to see a small-time fraudster, Guru (Santhanam), who works for Bhaiya (Radha Ravi), a popular drug dealer in Mumbai.The latter assigns the job of finding the young girl to Guru (Santhanam) and he even agrees to pay a huge money in return. Guru realises that the girl he is looking for resides in Tiruchy and her name is Malli ((Rittika Sen), an ambitious filmmaker. He travels from Mumbai to Tiruchy and hatches a plan to abduct the girl. He promises Malli to help her in realising her dreams of becoming a director and takes her to Mumbai. After all struggling to convince her, he summons Malli in front the industrialist. However, Guru changes his mind, as he realises that he had already fallen for her. Will he save Malli from the womaniser with the help of his friend (Yogi Babu) or flees the city with the money?

There are of course a few moments in the film which could have been improved to generate enough laughs, but sadly those are left under-utilised. The wafer-thin plot offers you nothing but a tireful experience of watching a bad cinema. The first half is uninteresting and the second doesn’t help the film’s recovery as it is crowded with several characters whose roles are redundant. The only saviour of the film is Yogi Babu’s one-liners, of which, half of it were revealed in the promos. Santhanam shines in the fight sequence, though it lacks punch at times.

It merely entertaining, and also has logical loopholes that do not let you to connect with the film at all. Characters look unreal, without any purpose. The background score, composed by Vijay Narein, is decent and lends a helping hand. Overall, Dagaalty is a poorly-written film that shouldn’t have been made.