Once in a while, you find yourself sitting inside a movie theatre and questioning all the life choices you’ve made. Choices that have led you precisely to this point, to this theatre, to watch this film. And director RK Vidhyadaran’s Itly does a great job at it.
Despite having excellent actors on board - Saranya Ponvannan, Kovai Sarala, Kalpana (late), Devadarshini of Kaanchana fame, Manobala and Mansoor Ali Khan among others, the film punches you in the gut for even hoping to be mildly entertained by it.
The film’s story, if you can call it that, is that of three elderly women planning to rob a bank because they were robbed at a bank. You might want to read that sentence again.
The film gets its title from the names of the three main characters, Inba (Sharanya), Twinkle (Kovai Sarala) and Lilly (Kalpana) - I-T-Ly - who are close friends. Two minutes into the film, you realise that the biggest con the director has played on the audience is in making the three women sport a couple of white hair stands to pass off as paatis (grandmother)! Inba even has a teenaged granddaughter!
The film also has the most outrageous and insensitive explanation for OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) reducing it to ‘If i think of it, I can’t control myself from doing it, and I have to do it thrice’.
The film’s plotline is as random as random can get. There’s a terrorist gang that blackmails young women with their private tapes to extort money, another gang that ‘trains’ aged people to rob banks (somehow the two are connected), and then there’s Inba, Twinkle and Lily who plan to rob a bank for Inba’s granddaughter’s surgery. And oh there’s a runaway couple, who are living together right opposite Inba’s house - a good chance for the director to explain what ‘living together’ actually means.
The director perhaps was not satisfied with all the loose threads in his story. He lacked a crucial element - a message. The film’s story is therefore: paatis rob a bank to thwart a terrorist group that blackmails young women. Their message somehow is: “If 500 men had stood up to the one boy who wanted to stab/throw acid on a woman in public, will another boy be able to do it? As history would have it, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who abolished Sati, was a man!”
Thankfully there are no songs in the film. Imaan Annachi plays cop, Vennirai Aadai Moorthy plays an astrologer and Manobala plays China who is Twinkle’s love interest. Actor Swaminathan plays the angry father and Mansoor Ali Khan the terrorist.
There’s a good dose of terrible comedy. Honestly, people should stop using fart jokes just because they cannot come up with anything better. The sentimental dialogues in the film are no better. Itly is a film we could have done without.
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.