‘Snakes and Ladders’ Review: The Kids are Not All Right

Directors: Kamala Alchemis, Bharath Muralidharan, Ashok Veerappan
Writers: Kamala Alchemis, Dhivakar Kamal
Cast: Naveen Chandra, Muthukumar, Nandha, Sasha Bharen, M.S. Samrith, Tarun Yuvraaj, S. Surya Ragaveshwar, S. Surya Kumar, Sreejith Ravi, Srinda, Manoj Bharathiraja
Language: Tamil
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video

I’ve reached a cranky age where I question the upbringing of children who misbehave on screen. For instance, I spent nine full episodes of Snakes and Ladders judgmentally shaking my head at the families of five school-going kids who dig themselves into such a deep hole that I’m not sure the series ever manages to extract them from it. From killing a thief and hiding his rotting corpse multiple times to holding someone hostage and shooting a kind gangster dead, these five young characters put the hardened criminals and cops of Snakes and Ladders to shame. In a parallel universe, this is the supervillain origin story of budding serial killers whose self-preservation instincts kick in at a formative age. But, of course, Snakes and Ladders is more interested in “dark humour”, so they’re only supposed to be a naughty group caught in a sticky situation.

The year is 2006. In the fictional hilltown of Rettamugadu, five E.T.-coded and Stranger Things-coded friends named Gilly (M.S. Samrith), Bala (Tarun Yuvraaj), Irai (S. Surya Ragaveshwar), Sandy (S. Surya Kumar) and Raagi (Sasha Bharen) find themselves at the centre of an ‘accident’. After a museum heist, an asthmatic crook named Blade is trapped by Gilly in his kitchen and dies of suffocation. This incident triggers two simultaneous chains of events. The first features Gilly and his gang’s attempts to get rid of the body and cover up their tracks. This includes a photoshopped corpse, a broken cell phone, a lost inhaler, an abduction, and the search for Blade’s absconding partner-in-crime. The second chain features the police investigation, a priceless tribal pendant that’s gone missing with Blade, and a warring gangster syndicate with a tech expert named Leo (Naveen Chandra), a don named Rico (Muthukumar) and a pimp named Paneer. In other words, the kids and their mischief collide with the adults and their misdeeds. No prizes for guessing who wins. (Hint: it’s not the viewer.)

For a show named after a morality game, Snakes and Ladders does well to blur the lines between an adult-themed children’s adventure and a children-driven adult thriller. I like that the kids constantly push the boundaries of the PG-13 ideals imposed on them by a society — and a storytelling culture — built on infantilising them. Nobody in the town suspects their involvement in something so murky; they thrive and operate in these social shadows. Their audacity is derived more from innocence than guilt; the further they go, the more invisible and culpable they become. I also like that the plot doesn’t take the easy way out; one of them cracks under pressure and their circumstances get messier. A lot of the suspense brings to mind Khiladi (1992), where the ‘suspects’ were a bit older but the panicked intentions were similar.

That’s also where Snakes and Ladders goes wrong. It’s so focused on humanising the friendship that it ends up desensitising the kids themselves. At first, you see Gilly’s conscience act up; he even goes for a confession at the local church. You see the others hesitate, too. But the plot is rigged to rationalise their actions — one of them lives with his grandparents; another has an abusive father; another has a single mother; and yet another is a topper with a family so functional that it’s eerie. It becomes harder to root for these friends; the writing insists that they’re “mischievous” even as they cross over to the dark side. There are times when the flawed nature of these teenagers and their natural hand at deception challenge our impression of a traditionally playful genre. But it’s almost chilling to see them think the way they do. What is described as daring in the logline quickly mutates into creepy.

At one point, they do a The Prestige (2006) and hire blind beggars to dig up the rotting body and transport it to an undisclosed location. There’s nothing cute about the plan; it’s actually pretty deranged if you think about it. After a while, nothing seems to faze them — guns, blood, dead bodies, violence. They even hide in a pimp’s bedroom while a face-off and murder take place. The people they harm are obviously immoral (people who “deserve” it), but the emotional toll and scars of committing adult crimes are never visible. You expect them to face the traumatic consequences of losing their innocence. Yet, the series resolves it easily, as if they’ve done nothing wrong and only suffer for being young and brave. It’s disorienting to realise that this is just another memorable episode of their lives.

Since the opening credits include a shot of them cycling against the silhouette of a moon, the implication is that we view them through the lens of Spielbergian fantasy. But it’s glaringly obvious that these are children written by adults who’re overestimating them; the result is no different from the stories that patronise and underestimate them. At one point, I could swear that a four-year-old boy gleefully sticks an axe into the foot of an imposter and skips away. The kids stage their entire operation from the backyard of Gilly’s grandparents’ house; the couple is too old to hear or see the racket every night (the old man has Alzheimer’s, so he’s milked for chuckles that never come). The narrative conceit is still fine, but the anatomy of the quaint bungalow is never elaborate enough to justify these big secrets. There’s a moment where an inspector is busy arguing with the grandparents in the living room, while the nervous children have gagged a man in the storeroom. The man keeps trying to escape; there are close calls. But the tension isn’t plausible because of the physicality: both rooms look like they belong to different houses and separate spaces, and the geography remains incoherent.

When Snakes and Ladders loses objectivity with this kiddie gang, it overcompensates through the adult drama. The arrival of Leo in the town and the forced eccentricity of Rico only work on paper. The internal gang war, the conspiracies and the police investigation — led by Irai’s father, S.I. Chezian (Nandha) — play out like a convoluted hybrid between a serious procedural and a black comedy gone rogue. It falls apart in the last two episodes, with attacks and chases filmed in the most uninteresting manner. Reducing the frame rate to quicken a shot of normal activity (a man watching the kids from afar) is always a red flag. The crossed wires, clunky choreography and changing loyalties cushion the complicity of the children. In one scene, the inspector literally narrates his theories to a forensic officer at the crime site so that an undercover crook can overhear every detail. Indian cinema often struggles with exposition devices, but this one takes the vegan cake. All the performances suffer from this tonal confusion and first-draft filmmaking, though Naveen Chandra does a passable riff on The Professor from Money Heist.

I suppose Snakes and Ladders is a classic victim of cinephilia. Its reverence for Tamil and Hollywood classics overrides its own identity as a subversion of young fiction. It lacks the levity and moral conviction of the Home Alone franchise. Every time the youngsters climb a ladder to escape, a snake brings them back to square one, but they then start to resemble those snakes. How wrong did the elders go? Is nobody monitoring the video games they play and the movies they watch? At least their seniors from school nurse ordinary habits like bullying, booze, porn and drugs (featuring Bob Marley music). I get that it’s about the hidden agency and cleverness of children, but juvenile prison seems to be the best option for this gang. I’d like to believe they’d be in their thirties today, haunted by demons of hilltowns past while peeling potatoes in a community kitchen. But this series would like to believe that they’re chilling at a bar — their waiters bleeding to death — and fondly recalling the winter of 2006 and those Nokia 6600 days.