I'm Game review: a great hand, played safe

Dan John would bet on a coin landing on its edge if the odds looked right. He is the kind of rich kid whose whole personality is a losing streak. He lives on his father’s money, loses it on cricket, and when his mother hands him sixty lakh to clear a debt, that goes on a match too. What follows is a chase, a crash, a coma, and a hand transplant from a donor nobody will name. The operation is a success. The hand, unfortunately, has plans of its own.

In its opening hour, I’m Game is the most fun Dulquer Salmaan has been on screen in years. Nahas Hidhayath, following up RDX, wisely kept the hand out of the promos, and the film is funniest when neither Dan nor we know what it will do next. It slaps him into behaving, ruins his wagers, and finally picks a casino fight in which he is wrestling himself while thrashing everyone else. Anbariv’s choreography finds clever things to do inside that limitation, and Jakes Bejoy’s score treats every punch like a jackpot.

The casinos and clubs Jimshi Khalid shoots in neon are where Dan John is happiest, and where the film is too.

Dulquer plays the lunacy straight, which is why it works. His delayed reactions do half the work, and the stretch leading into the interval pushes him into a physical performance he hasn’t attempted before. He is better fighting the hand than joking with it, though. Vinay Forrt, as his friend Freddy, gets a laugh out of every scene he is allowed into.

Then the film cannot resist explaining the joke. The hand has a past, the past has a name, Vignesh “Vicky” Das (Antony Varghese), and Vicky has a grievance against David Abraham (Mysskin). A flashback the length of a short film lays it all out like someone insisting on showing every receipt, and a film that had been toying with a fresh idea settles for the oldest one on the shelf: the wronged man, the smug villain, the showdown in his den. Dulquer called Antony Varghese the film’s true hero at the Chennai launch, and the actor gives Vicky more weight than the writing does. The betting racket rots a whole sport, but the film uses that only as fuel for Vicky’s revenge and never ties it back to Dan’s own addiction.

Mysskin is the bigger letdown. He is a filmmaker who can be unnerving on screen by doing very little, and here he is asked to do a lot, with lines that sound written for a cackle. Kayadu Lohar’s Isha, the physiotherapist Dan falls for, gets little beyond proximity to him. Samyuktha Viswanathan, as Vicky’s girlfriend Tharini, fares slightly better, though both women are finally there to be hurt so the men have something to avenge. Kathir’s cricket captain exists to move the plot.

Dan tries romance with his physiotherapist Isha (Kayadu Lohar), a track the film keeps around without knowing what to do with it.

At close to three hours, the film has a good ninety minutes inside it. Jimshi Khalid’s Hyderabad of neon casinos and wet, grimy streets keeps it watchable well past the point where the writing stops trying. A film about a hand that refuses to take orders should not be this obedient.