It sets off in a highly distressed and serious tone which grabs your attention and keeps you seated for the rest of the duration but loses the audience midway.
The crux of Bloody Beggar lies in its well-written and eccentric characters – a beggar who enjoys begging, his ironic companion, a ghost that only Kavin can see and interact with, an entire madhouse with deceitful and money-driven people who assume the roles of cinema characters and they all leave you in splits.
Some jokes are funny, especially the everyday beggar portions of Kavin where he battles different kinds of people to earn a penny or two and the irony of him leading a fancy lifestyle but I don’t know if it’s a Nelson thing or a Redin Kinsley thing but you see ‘jokes’ like “valicha solla poguthu gomathi” in Bloody Beggar too. They’re regressive, dark, and unfunny. It’s high time Tamil Cinema gets told that JUST making a character gay or a cross-dresser, isn’t comedy at all and that comedy involves writing ACTUAL comedy. Making a grown man in your film wear a frock and speaking in a high-pitched, feminine voice is not dark humour. It is simply a poorly written, lazy, repetitive “joke”.
The producer of Bloody Beggar, Nelson is quite famous for such desperate, homophobic attempts at humour. In Doctor, one of the henchman is asked to wear a nightie and is called “gomathi akka“, to demean him and strip him off his masculinity because he lost a game. Does losing a game make you emasculated? Will the then emasculation make you a woman? So does being a woman mean being inferior? In Jailer, another bunch of henchmen, dress up in nighties to drive the ambulance. What even was the point of that?
In a time where people are demanding more inclusive spaces in media, with series like Made In Heaven casting transwomen or movies like Super Deluxe normalizing gender fluidity, young filmmakers like Sivabalan Muthukumar are making it very very difficult for the future generations to progress.
There are also unnecessary mentions of extra-marital affairs and fatphobia for “comical” reasons at the expense of the uni-dimensional women characters who are aplenty, but not notable. But the one-liners work well in a few places coupled with characters that are loud, peculiar but pass off, because they are interesting, especially the women, who are as shrewd, cruel and vicious as the men.
Kavin is good as a performer, as always and this time, he’s pretty convincing in the role he has played for which the make-up team needs to be appreciated the most for turning him into a very believable beggar. The cinematography of a highly-saturated decor to the palace gives it a gawdy look too. Bloody Beggar tries hurriedly to make up for all the emotional connect that’s lost in the first 2 hours, in the last 30 minutes. But it’s got a few brilliant ideas, like using video game animations as a mode of visual storytelling to advance the plot, or retreating to flashbacks with songs to introduce characters.
Rating – 2/5
