Review – Coffee With Kadhal

It was a promising beginning to the film, setting up the characters and preparing us for a classic Sundar C movie with a big star cast and lots of tensions resolved with laugh-out-loud humour. But what we see instead is a string of dated drama written with utter lack of seriousness.

The first part of the plot was designed to provide the ideal conflict for a classic comedy of errors, which is typically a successful template for the director and is similar to films like Ullathai Allitha, Mettukudi, Kalakalappu, and so forth. Coffee with Kaadhal ends up being a tremendous letdown because of how casually and slowly it is handled.

The three brothers, their spouses, fiancées, and love interests, the tensions, and ultimately “who marries who” are the subjects of the tale. The execution of some corny writing with scenarios we’ve seen for decades is the issue here. For example, the sacrifices a hero makes for his loved ones and his family, the heroines’ unwavering loyalty to the heroes, who they eventually join forces with no matter what happens in the course of the movie, the fact that the parents of both the guy and the girl have no other responsibility than to support them in their endeavours, and, most importantly, the way the movie treats its female characters.

Since there was not a single scenario in the movie that I could relate to, I felt extremely disassociated. In an effort to bring the vibrant cinematic beauty, many scenes lost their logical coherence, and the majority of scenes and dialogue were overdramatic and artificial. However, this attempt ultimately failed miserably. Helping characters should have some value in addition to supporting the plot and the main characters. The parents essentially play the supporting role while giving the hero/heroine a nod. Because of the wearying script, Yuvan’s BGM serves as solace and the songs are ignored. With the exception of Jai, DD, Jiiva, and Amritha Aiyer, the rest of the cast has little to offer. Yogi Babu and Redin Kingsley are comic relief with a few effective one-liners. One of the few things that looked beautiful and worked for me was definitely the premise that Jiiva and DD are twins.

We need comedies, big, star-studded, family- and relationship-focused comedies, and I continue to be a supporter of laughter therapy, as seen in even one of the director’s most recent films Kalakalappu. However, something dreadfully wrong has happened with Coffee with Kaadhal’s literature, which is out of date for this generation and period.