In director Prince Joy’s Titans, there’s an earnest effort to make us rethink the way we imagine mystical concepts that feel larger than us.
In a clip from the teaser that went viral, we see the character played by Jayasurya ask another person if the character played by Vinayakan can be trusted. "Does he look like someone who smokes or does drugs?" is the rhetorical question, as the camera cuts to a close-up of Vinayakan smiling innocently. It’s an easy laugh that plays on our stereotypes of what a smoker or an alcoholic looks like, made funnier by the real-life incidents that contributed to Vinayakan’s infamy.
Which is why it’s genuinely surprising to see how earnestly the film makes us reconsider traditional notions. The film draws on the distant vision of Wim Wenders’ heartbreakingly beautiful Wings of Desire (1987) to create a world in which mere mortals coexist with angels and demons. So when the film introduces us to Vinayakan as a guardian angel, it feels refreshing. But this isn’t simply a one-off attempt to play on the irony of recasting the stereotypical bad guy as a wonderfully generous angel. Take the rule within the film about the colour of these angels’ wings. Vinayakan’s Rejimon points to the single white feather in his massive wingspan and correlates it with the one mortal whose soul he needs to fight for.
Instead, it’s the people with white wings that one must be wary of in Prince Joy’s universe. When we’re introduced to the character played by Sunny Wayne, a man dressed from head to toe in white, like Morgan Freeman’s God in Bruce Almighty, we assume purity or the kind of niceness one associates with the colour. But he’s the demon of the Titans universe. So, while the demons work out of a multi-storey glass building that resembles Apple’s headquarters, the everyday angels work out of what looks like the most basic government office, the kind you run to when you need to pay your electricity bill.
Dig deeper, and you can unearth the politics of the writer-director duo. Indrans, playing the perennially stressed-out manager at this government office, indulges in either beef or pork as he tries to keep all the world’s mortals happy. As for Rejimon, he gets to create genuine empathy for everyone he feels deserves his love.
It’s a lovely little concept that the makers have embraced, one with the same emotional core as even lovelier films like Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. While it does not take a single wrong step when it comes to its fantastical elements, it goes awry when it tries to play up the silliness of its comedy. It’s perhaps the hangover of the three Aadu films that casts a shadow over the universe of Titans.
Apart from Jayasurya and Vinayakan, the film’s creative and production crew have all worked on the three Aadu films. Here, instead of focusing on the film’s simple earnestness or its noble intentions, it feels like they are forced to double down on Aadu-style comedy sequences, as though they felt insecure about the film’s core idea.
Butt jokes, fat jokes and those inane under-the-breath one liners are par for the course as they decide to settle for much less. What doesn’t add up is the routine Jayasurya performance you’ve seen multiple times before. If the loudness of it comes from Shaji Pappan from the Aadu movies, the setting and his body language bring to mind the character he played in director Shafi’s Poppins. But beyond the performance, it’s the writing of this character that comes across as another compromise. We do not feel anything for Anthony Yakuza as a person, which is vital for a film that writes itself around the man’s transformation, as seen from the point of view of his guardian angel. We neither think Anthony is slimy enough to require desperate redemption, nor feel he’s good enough to remain who he is. Instead of a man like Anthony, one wishes that an angel like Rejimon be assigned to a more complex character, the kind that makes you scratch your head.
It’s not that the film is unwatchable. But if you’ve got the wings anyway, why wouldn’t you spread them and make the concept fly?