'Chatha Pacha' Movie Review: The Boys Are OK In This Well-Made Nostalgic Action Comedy 

As an audience, perhaps we underestimate the power of nostalgia done right. In what was being marketed as India’s first WWE-style wrestling movie, the makers of Chatha Pacha could easily have begun their movie as a story about a group of twenty-somethings, who start their local wrestling league just as a business idea. But the writers of the film, which includes director Advaith Nayar, decide to begin the film with a flashback of three little boys, taking on each other in their life’s first wrestling ring… their parents’ double cot.

It’s a visual that takes you right back to childhood, especially if you’re a 90s or a 2000s kid; back to a period when all of us refused to believe wrestling was made up. So when the flashback ends with the oldest boy choke-slamming his younger brother while breaking the bed in the process, the transportation to the '90s becomes as Raw as Monday Night Live. But there’s more to this prologue than meets the eye. Apart from the way it sets up visual ideas that return much later to give you one goosebumps moment after another, the film itself is an extension of what happens when one of these wrestling bouts sort of gets out of hand. Even when you’re play-acting like you’re wrestling, it was always the order of the day for a punch or a kick to end up really hurting your opponent and for that fight to suddenly become too real.

Chatha Pacha explores sibling rivalry within this context, and the best parts of the film include moments in which real-life fights begin to mirror the wrestling match-ups that were meant to be fake. Instead of delving into the artificiality of wrestling or “costume ghusti” as they call it, the writers obsess over matches that are as personal as they can get. 

This includes the hilarious fight sequence at the start in which one of the characters need to enter the ring just moments after he’s been told that his girlfriend has eloped with his best friend. As silly as it sounds, when this man runs into the ring with his tears wiping out elements of his make-up, it feels like a sub-plot that pays homage to Mera Naam Joker. 

But if you ask me, the influence that really hit home was that of the OG gusthi movie of Malayalam, the 1986 comedy directed by Sibi Malayil: Mutharamkunnu PO. You draw parallels between the character played by Nedumudi Venu in that film with the character played by Vishak Nair here—both rich and powerful, both trying whatever they can to earn respect. Vishak’s Cherian becomes the film’s most interesting character too; just when you think of him as a true-blue villain, he shows shades of the issues that made him this person today, reminding us of that boy from childhood who could to play with us only because he was the only one with a cricket bat and a ball. 

Tiny elements like this go a long way in making Chatha Pacha a little more than a movie that makes you wait for the next big wrestling match. In a sense, I caught myself watching this movie like I used to watch Jean Claude Van Damme movies. Of course, there’s drama and revenge motive in those movies too, but we would be lying to ourselves if we thought we watched those movies for the plot. But when drama makes way for Loco Lobo to take on Vetri, played by Arjun Ashokan and Roshan Mathew respectively (both in their element), what we’re drawing from is the biggest sibling war we’d grown up witnessing—that of Kane and The Undertaker.

Which is what finally matters at the end of the day. . The atmosphere and the visuals are stunning and it’s surprising how we feel like we’re ringside along with those spectators, as though we’re inches away from beads of their sweat coming straight towards us. So, we don’t really care about the way important details feel rushed and underwritten. For instance, why is Savio’s boat being taken away from him? And if he’s so broke, how does he raise enough money to start Friday Night Live? How is Siddique’s character involved so deeply in the film’s conflict? And finally, why is the issue between Vetri and Savio getting resolved so abruptly?

These questions do not come with satisfying answers, and the writing does falter in several places. But when a two-and-a-half-hour film feels two-and-a-half-minutes long, you know the crew has done something right. It is nostalgia done just right, appealing to the child in you, way more than the adult that’s trying to make sense of these issues. Chatha Pacha may not be a Stone Cold stunner, but works as a lovingly-made tribute to a group of boys, who dared to try it at home... just like we all did.