‘Con City’ review: Arjun Das-Anna Ben starrer squanders promising con-artist premise
Chennai: There’s something truly primal about the satisfaction of watching a confidence trickster at work and rooting for them to get away with their spoils. From Dulquer Salmaan’s acclaimed turn a couple of years ago to the enduring recall of Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, cinema has long proved there’s tremendous scope in the ‘desperate victim turned trickster’ trope.
That prospect made Con City, starring Arjun Das and Anna Ben, feel exciting on paper. Directed by Harish Durairaj, the Tamil film begins with the promise of a fun entertainer about an unlikely gang of con artists — until the writing begins to teeter away from that premise.
Con City joins a long list of mid-budget Tamil films that rely too heavily on an interesting one-liner while squandering character depth and ingenuity, the film suggests.
The fault in the mechanics becomes apparent by the end of the first half. What starts as a slick setup soon feels like a try-hard endeavour that obsessively revels in the peculiarity of its own ideas, though the pay-off isn’t all there. The high-speed mocobot shots, slow-motion walks, parallel cuts, and grand reveals could have worked, if not for the contrivance and superficial writing.
The plot follows Saravanan (Arjun Das at his best), Mithra (Anna Ben), her differently abled son Jeeva (Agilan), Jackie (Yogi Babu), and Jackie’s mother Janaki (Vadivukkarasi) living as a family that runs a hotel in Mulki, Karnataka. They are not really a family, but a group of convicts on the run from Chennai.
We learn that Saravanan’s fraud at the EB office where he worked, Mithra’s gamble with her fake rental management company, and Jackie and Janaki’s use of a trust as a front for circulating money all went kaboom, pushing them into hiding.
