‘Devil’s Double Next Level’ movie assessment: Santhanam’s barely humorous, least scary addition to an uneven franchise

Santhanam and Rajendran in a nonetheless from ‘Devil’s Double Next Level’
| Photo Credit: Think Music India/YouTube

Let naysayers and non-believers say what they need, the Dhilluku Dhuddu movies are the form of responsible pleasure that should preserve this world working. There’s a bungalow, a ghost or two, a foul-mouthed Santhanam, a Rajendran who leaves you in splits, and a fundamental storyline with just a few twists that someway retains you invested. Of course, there are the same old issues, just like the fresh-faced heroine used as eye-candy and Santhanam awkwardly nonetheless clinging onto his goals of turning into a business cinema hero who can struggle and dance. Devil’s Double Next Levela.okay.a DD Next Level isn’t too completely different from the primary three movies of this franchise (whereas authorized causes may forestall them from formally calling it a franchise, each movie has a meta line about being a sequel). However, the jokes don’t land the place supposed, and post-interval, the movie finally ends up as a dreadful mess.

DD Next Level strikes away from how every of its predecessors launched the lead characters to the haunted bungalow. In Dhilluku Dhuddu, the heroine’s father, who’s towards her relationship, manipulates and takes the hero and his household to a bungalow to kill him off, unaware of the haunting presence there. In the second half, the heroine’s father was a black magician who despatched a yatchi to defend his daughter from males lusting after her. The third was quirkier, revolving round a bag of cash that many events chase after, together with the hero who wants it to save his relationship, just for the bag to find yourself in a haunted French villa.

A nonetheless from ‘Devil’s Double Next Level’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

DD Next Level, surprisingly, doesn’t wait to introduce the horror ingredient, taking off from a well-staged sequence that includes common Tamil reviewer Prashanth. We are launched to a mysterious ghost named Hitchcock Irudhayaraj (Selvaraghavan) who lures movie critics to his mysterious theatre known as Cinema Paradise (easter eggs abound, together with a black magician named Mama Kurosawa) and kills them off as a result of they’re spoiling the sanctity of cinema. ‘Unga amma enga amma illa da, cinema!’ utters Irudhayaraj at one second. But earlier than you anticipate a critical tackle movie criticism, like R Balki’s Chup, I have to remind you that it is a Santhanam movie. And so director S Prem Anand swaps all that potential for some low-hanging fruits.

Our protagonist, a reasonably annoying one, is Kissa 47, an acclaimed movie reviewer on YouTube. He behaves like a man-child emulating a Gen Z rapper and calls everybody ‘Bro’ in an accent that Santhanam struggles to keep. One night time, Kissa’s YouTuber girlfriend Aasai Harshini (Geethika Tiwary), mom (Kasthuri), father (Nizhalgal Ravi), and sister (Yashika Anand) are pulled into Irudhayaraj’s movie, known as Hitchcock Irudhayaraj. Kissa and his pal Veenpechu Babu (Rajendran) too enter the movie’s world to save the previous’s household, however to their shock, they discover them enjoying quirky characters of Hitchcock Irudhayaraj, on a cruise ship with a masked killer, unaware of who they are surely. His mom is a Telugu-speaking thief named Shilpa, his father is Captain McDonald, and his sister is Maya, a scantily-clad lady who’s in love with…Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Detective Ragavan, the hero of Hitchcock Irudhayaraj.

After following these characters hilariously evading the masked killer, the movie strikes to an island mansion that’s haunted by a ghost named Jessica, performed by Kissa’s girlfriend Harshini. And that’s the place all of the chaos ensues on this slasher-cum-supernatural horror. Much of those preliminary parts work due to the numerous meta-references that organically discover their means in. When they meet a Thai-speaking man who provides them a clue, Kissa and Babu can decode as a result of subtitles seem on the display screen. When Gautham romances Maya, the scene cuts to them dancing to ‘Uyirin Uyire’ from Kaakha Kaakha (props to Gautham for being a sport). Similarly, Kissa and Babu can hear voiceovers, play with slow-motion pictures, and even journey to the previous via flashbacks. Being a movie reviewer, Kissa even asks a fellow character not to utter misogynistic dialogue.

A nonetheless from ‘Devil’s Double Next Level’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Unfortunately, every part goes haywire for Devil’s Double Next Level within the second half, the place the author has clearly exhausted all of the methods in his arsenal, and we’re left with a reasonably tedious one hour that spoils all of the enjoyable. At one occasion, the makers repeat an thought from DD Returns that someway simply doesn’t work right here. There’s additionally this testing scene surrounding Nizhalgal Ravi’s bowel actions that the movie may have finished with out. What may have been a enjoyable and taut comedy-horror will get stretched. A gaggle of cannibals are launched, serving no goal aside from letting Santhanam flex his muscle mass in some struggle sequences.

The greatest letdown is the horror ingredient on the centre; each Jessica and Irudhayaraj are simply essentially the most boring ghosts within the franchise, and also you definitely miss the gory kills and weapons-wielding ghosts of DD Returns. The scares decline, GVM’s character turns into as inanimate as a movie prop, and the metaness of the movie begins to put on skinny.

At the top, the query that left me puzzled is how Kissa and Babu may see and work together with Irudhayaraj, who’s sitting comfortably at his theatre, watching all of it unfold on the display screen. Is it as a result of the makers couldn’t afford the price of VFX for a portal that hyperlinks the 2 worlds? But even a portal to one other dimension couldn’t have saved the movie from such writing or from besting Dhillukku Dhuddu 2 because the least entertaining entry to the franchise.

Devil’s Double Next Level is at the moment working in theatres