Boomerang movie review: Wants to be ambitious, but doesn’t end up that way

Boomerang movie rating: 2/5

Again, in Boomerang, like last week’s Thadam, heroes are being mistaken for their identical looks. The film opens with Shiva (Atharvaa) in an ambulance, rushing into the hospital after a fire accident. His face is disfigured, and his parents are told he needs a face transplant. Post-surgery, Shiva gets a new face. Thanks to a brain-dead patient Shakthi (also Atharvaa), who looks like Shiva. Later, we’re shown the backstory of Shakthi, an IT employee. Unhappy with his job, he decides to become a farmer. Director Kannan tries to tell too many things with Boomerang, and that ruins even a good story premise.

Since it’s a ‘commercial’ film, there’s this mandatory love angle between GG, a short filmmaker (Megha Akash) and Shiva, which could have been avoided. Because the story makes sense even without that. GG falls for Shiva, but he would have proposed to her when he wasn’t all that “great looking”. (That was before the face transplant happened). Shiva points this out to GG, and only then she realises he was the same guy she had rejected before. All your heroes and heroines fall in love because they’re “good looking”, and nobody cares if you’re a good person or not. All right.

Shiva gets attacked by a couple of strangers, and he realises his life is in danger. He wants to know why some goons attacked him. (That’s because he’s being mistaken for Shakthi.) So, Shiva wants to know who’s Shakthi and goes to his hometown, Tiruchy. From this point, Boomerang travels like political commentary. There are multiple references to everything from Sterlite, farmer’s issue to NEET, corruption, privatisation and so on.

Kannan does similar things like what AR Murugadoss did in Sarkar, Anand Shankar did in NOTA and Prabhu did in LKG—discuss the pressing issues—weave them into the script. I think filmmakers need to be told it’s okay to make films that don’t have political references. We know you guys are socially and politically conscious, but, it’s not right to shove a message down our throats for the sake of it. Hey, by the way, Boomerang also discusses the interlinking of rivers.

Shakthi wants to do some good for his hometown people, sketches a plan, makes a presentation and takes it to the government. It all sounds fantastic on paper, but what about the execution?

Kannan might have had good intentions, but they simply don’t become a good film. The director expresses anger and frustration over the system. His protagonist Shakthi protests like Mani Ratnam’s Aayutha Ezhuthu-hero. (Kannan has assisted Mani Ratnam, okay?) But nothing quite touches you. In case, Boomerang had a ‘mass’ hero, it could have worked. Again, I’m not sure. Because the audience also gets bored when they listen to the same set of ‘messages’ with every ‘commercial’ film.