Tharun Bhascker’s two releases before Keedaa Cola – Pelli Choopulu (2016) and Ee Nagaraniki Emaindi (2018) – were both about somewhat aimless people trying to figure out a path in life. His third feature is no different. Here, the drama revolves around a cola bottle with a cockroach, a possible ticket out of misery for the protagonists. 

Vaasthu (Chaitanya Madadi), his grandfather (Brahmanandam), and his friend Kaushik/Lancham (Rag Mayur) dream big when this bottle lands in their hands. Vaasthu has Tourette Syndrome, a nervous system condition that makes him emit sounds and produce gestures that are not under his control. His grandfather is seriously ill and in a wheelchair with a urine bag attached to him (this is referred to as an “ucha packet”). His friend wears quirky T-shirts and is a smooth talker.

They run into a criminal gang that has its own reasons for wanting the bottle – Naidu (Tharun Bhascker), his brother Jeevan (Jeevan), and his sidekick Sikander (Vishnu). These gangsters are also quirky. They try to speak in English as often as possible for their self-improvement. The rest of the cast also has its share of eccentricities, the biggest of which is that the “heroine” and only female character in the film is actually a life-size doll (a medical simulator). 

Now all this may sound hilarious on paper, but when a film gives each of its characters a “quirk”, it is often a sign that the characterisation isn’t going to go beyond that. The problem with this approach is that the quirks are played for comedy throughout the runtime and become tiring when there is nothing else to make you laugh. The Guy Ritchie aesthetic – visually and in conception – only works if there is good writing to back it. 

The premise of Keedaa Cola has great potential for comedy, but the screenplay unfolds like a series of skits, dropping jokes and gags that are only occasionally funny. The writing is distracted, and we jump from one incident to another, as if watching random reels on an Instagram feed. Does the film want to be a spoof, a satire, or a philosophical rumination? Maybe it wants to be all of these, but the writing isn’t solid enough to pull it off.

Naidu speaks broken English in one scene but in another, he constantly corrects Sikander’s language. The latter scene is among the few genuinely funny sequences in the film, but you watch it without investing anything in the characters. In another scene, Naidu suddenly goes into a woke rant about how heroines are portrayed in cinema. Yes, it’s amusing, but you get the impression that these are random clever lines that the director thought of and somehow wanted to include in a film – not something organic to the character. 

The second half of Keeda Cola picks up pace, but the film never rises above its skit-like quality. Again, we have a bunch of characters with “quirks” – a squint-eyed assassin, an assassin who is hard of hearing, a very short assassin, and a non-stop talker assassin. Why Tharun thought disability should be exploited for humour is anyone’s guess. Or, why for that matter, should someone’s poor English be so funny? There’s also a tiny plot thread with a trans woman that just looks unnecessary and tokenistic. The intention may not have been to play it for cheap laughs, but that’s what it ends up being. Am I being too woke in the criticism? Well, if Naidu can talk about the state of heroines in our cinema, some woke criticism should be par for the course, shouldn’t it?

Clever comedy is hard to nail because more often than not, the effort to sound clever is enough to kill the humour in a line or situation. Despite its short runtime of just 120 minutes, Keedaa Cola is too laboured. It’s fine to make a film about aimless people but the filmmaking itself ought not to be aimless. This cola runs out of its fizz way too quickly. 

Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.

Sowmya Rajendran writes on gender, culture, and cinema. She has written over 25 books, including a nonfiction book on gender for adolescents. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for her novel Mayil Will Not Be Quiet in 2015.