'Con City' Movie Review: Amusing Stretches In An Otherwise Listless Con-Com

The best parts of Con City are when it tries, quite successfully, to be a found family film. It has a gentle pace and takes its time to introduce us to its lead characters and the complex manner which they come to meet one another. If Saravanan (Arjun Das) and Mithra (Anna Ben) are pushed into a life of crime as a result of their respective predicaments, the mother-son duo of Janaki (Vadivukarasi) and Jackie (Yogi Babu) are who they are simply because they want to get rich and make a movie. There’s no overt moralism in them and the fact that they all know this about themselves, makes them a family we feel like rooting for. More than their need to stick together to remain free, we feel that it’s this lack of morality that has somehow kept them together. 

They assume made-up roles to keep their family act going. Jackie and Mithra behave like siblings born to Janaki. Saravanan becomes Mithra’s husband and they even have a son named Jeeva, even if Saravanan has nothing to do with him. After seven years of trying to live the life of fugitives, we meet them just in time for their pasts to finally catch up. By this point, there’s a rehearsed perfection in the way they behave and what makes it exciting is that this family may have just been waiting for a chance to return to their fraudulent ways.

The first half of Con City works really well as a result. Each scam is given the right amount of time for it to make sense, and there’s a desperation to the scale of these scams getting bigger. Of these, Saravanan’s electricity board printer scam feels most original and also oddly plausible. There are several important junctures at which the film makes us believe that we too may have done the same, if we were ever pushed to that point. 

It’s when we come to the other characters that we feel their presence was rushed and convenient. If Mithra begins by imitating a con job that she fell prey to, Janaki and Jackie’s scam is played more for laughs. It doesn’t fully come together properly in the head but their sub-plot is always fun because Vadivukarasi is having the time of her life playing this dubious woman. She steals every scene she’s in, and it’s even funnier because her character manipulates the notion people have about a hapless, ageing woman.

But the issues begin once the film moves into its second half. The found-family film switches into a full-blown con game involving an entire city. From an intimate comedy with a handful of characters, the film begins to throw new people at us with each passing scene. And instead of spending the rest of its runtime detailing this one con job, it pushes itself too deeply into smaller aspects that do not sit well with the larger picture. In one instance, the film takes as much as 15 minutes to explain how this family distracts a journalist to put out a piece of fake news.

In hindsight, it doesn’t make sense why this sequence was given so much screentime and everything that follows feels rushed to a point where we’re grappling to understand where it all fits. An emotional song about Saravanan and Jeeva pops out of nowhere and another sequence involving Thambi Ramiah is so gratingly over-the-top that you sense the film slipping away. From the smaller, lighter details that made the film fun, we begin to feel like the film’s throwing everything at us, hoping some of it would stick.

The cleverness of the smaller scams begin to disappear and as the film settles into a predictable pattern. From consistently amusing, the humour begins to feel like a rarity. The effort to make something appear cool or funny becomes obvious and a film that began with great promise, suddenly starts to feel desperate. With all its pacing and detailing issues, Con City may have worked a lot better as a mini-series with enough time and importance given to the many scams that make up its runtime. But with its detour into a toll booth scam, it ends up as a comedy that takes a serious toll on one’s patience.