Nahas Hidhayath, both writer and director of I’m Game, does something clever by setting his second film in Hyderabad. When looked at purely as a business proposition, it makes sense given the stardom Dulquer Salmaan enjoys in the two Telugu-speaking states. From a narrative lens, the Hyderabad setting complements the film’s larger-than-life aspirations and the audacity with which it navigates a particularly improbable plotline. But instead of settling for this alien setting alone, it adds Tamil characters to its core. The film doesn’t even make a big deal of this, choosing instead to play this lack of specificity as something very natural to the film’s urban setting.
What these choices do is prepare us for a film that feels like it was not made in Malayalam. But there are advantages to this too. Instead of looking for realism or the crutch of logic to enter its crazy world, we’re already there about 10 minutes into the film. This creates a distance, as though this story is happening somewhere else, but it also sets the stage for the film to take a wild swing at almost anything, as long as it entertains.
And a wild swing it does take with a high concept that works equally well as a unique supernatural drama and as an uber cool origins story for a kick-ass superhero. For the most part, the first half of I’m Game is happy to play out like the aforementioned origins story. There’s a wayward hero named Dan (Dulquer) with daddy issues who just cannot sort himself out. He has a gambling problem too, and it takes a massive accident for him to come to his senses. Science intervenes and so does fate to make him a lot more than the man-child he was.
The scenes in which Dan comes to terms with the new him are among the most fun in the film; in a pattern we may only see in such a film, we see Dan in awkward long conversations, even when it’s just him alone in a room. And in a fight scene set in a casino, we see the most inventive action choreography in which Dan is both winning and losing the same fight. In a superhero movie, these are scenes that combine plot points detailing one's gaining of powers and how it eventually becomes their turning point.
But it’s when this origins story gets sidelined to take the form of a supernatural sports drama that the film loses the appeal that made it special. For a film that felt at ease taking such a wild swing at a unique high concept, it begins to play it safe again, worried if it might be too new for its massy audiences. From a film about a flawed hero with new powers undergoing a redemption, it turns into a much lesser film with the stalest revenge motive. If the first half is a wildly original re-imagination of a film like 1999 American supernatural comedy Idle Hands, the second half is a cop-out based around broader aspects of SS Rajamouli’s Eega (2012).
Which is a shame given how excited we feel at the end of the first half. And when the film takes this detour into a massive one-hour-long flashback, I’m Game suddenly rids itself of everything that made the film exciting and different. The biggest absence we feel here is that of Dan and the way Dulquer chose to play this character. Between reckless and batshit crazy, Dulquer manages to make us care for this brat, even when he has little to play with. Scenes that could easily have gone too far feel safe with Dulquer, especially when they’re written around him and his reactions alone.
Eventually, what disappoints most is how the film settles for safety. Not only do the emotional scenes not work, but it relies blindly on inflicting violence on female characters, only to elicit some sort of reaction from us. The silly villains inflict the rest of the damage. Mysskin feels too familiar as this generic baddie, and he struggles to pull off lines as campy as “I’ll send karma straight to Burma…” and an awkward line that rhymes Dan with Don.
There’s not much that Jimshi Khalid’s rich, neon-tinted visuals, or Jakes Bejoy’s funky score can do to revive the second half. So, when the film returns to superhero territory after what feels like forever, it cannot do justice to the highs it left us with at the end of the first half. For all the audacity the film begins with, it’s in choosing the predictable path that it lets its viewers down. And ironically for a film so obsessed with the magical powers of the human hand, it’s the punches that finally end up not landing.