‘Titans’ movie review: Jayasurya-starrer fails to utilise a promising concept blending humour and fantasy

Quite a few unusual writing choices can be seen in Prince Joy’s Titans, especially with how it treats its protagonist Antony Yakuza (Jayasurya), a small-time outlaw. Although the hangover of Jayasurya’s Shaji Pappan character from Aadu is very much visible in Antony, he is perhaps one of the most unheroic lead characters in a movie of this kind. In every situation, he is expected to either fail or do the wrong thing and he keeps up with that expectation much of the time.

The other interesting approach is in how writer James Sebastian portrays the done-to-death fight between good and evil, going behind the mechanics of how both sides operate, with Lucifer getting a glitzy corporate office and the other side in a location that is a stark contrast. Much of this might have looked great at a conceptual level, but it does not translate that well onto the screen.

What one is left with are a few scenes where everything comes together well, interspersed with long intervals of uninspired writing. The banter between Antony and his roommate Anwar (Nihal Nizam) and the many hare-brained plans that they devise with getaway driver Rejimon (Vinayakan) throw up enough scope for humour, but they manage to pull it off only occasionally. Like the sequence in which they attempt a major heist using a gas cutter or the one in which they attempt to rob a bank.

If Titans appears better than the sum of its parts, a good part of the credit has to go to Vinayakan, who lends a lot of depth to the character of Rejimon, lifting the otherwise predictable third act. After a point, he single-handedly carries the movie. The action sequences in these parts are also effective, considering the limited budgets. Rapper Baby Jean is convincing as the local don, but he gets an under-written character with limited scope to perform. Nihal, as the tech-savvy fraudster specialising in digital arrests, manages to draw laughs with some one-liners.

One of the film’s few positives is that some of the fantasy elements are seamlessly weaved into the story of a man aspiring to be a big-time gangster, that they almost seem believable. But the fact that women, except for a couple of blink-and-you-miss-it characters, are mostly absent from the film is glaring. None of them get even two or three lines to utter too.

Titans had a lot going for it at as a concept, but the makers fail to extract all the possibilities that it held.