Shashank Yeleti’s Don’t Trouble The Trouble was marketed as a children’s film for grown-ups. And it’s fairly easy to see why. Along with the coming of age of a young girl (Ssara Palekar), longing to find her lost parents, we also get the coming of age of an orphaned middle-aged man (Fahadh Faasil), longing to feel love, or a little of anything at all. The way Yeleti chooses to position the story of these two lonely wandering souls is intriguing, even if it never really takes off.
Suri (Faasil) is an ambulance driver who gets a kick out of a challenge. A slacker with a big personality, Suri’s eyes glint any time he is presented with an ultimatum. Whether it is darting an old man with a bad heart from one end of Hyderabad to the other within a few minutes or bringing a runt of a sheep to lock horns with a ferocious, superior ram in an illegal fight, Suri is there when there’s a quick buck at the end of a good bet. So when he meets young Divya (Palekar) and her peppy beagle Snoopy, who come to him with an impossible problem, Suri is hankering for the challenge.
The proposition that Divya serves Suri isn’t a simple one. The self-proclaimed Harry Potter fan believes she somehow made her parents disappear into thin air during a road trip; the last thing she remembers is being inside their car (the sweet girl is ten). Suri, whose ears perk up upon the mention of a ‘BMW’ in the story, takes up the challenge and promises to bring her back to her parents. But there’s a reason Divya leans on Suri, something that the swindler remains unaware of.
It’s obvious that the comedy is written to entertain children. We see it in the way action sequences are choreographed — Mahesh Manjrekar plays a powerful don who is brought down to his knees by the power of magic — and the way it flows largely indifferent to real-world logic. No trouble there, but it is when the film mistakes reasoning for any sort of depth or emotional groundwork that it keeps us at arm’s length.
FaFa brings expected amounts of charm to this largely lovable goof, reminiscent of his role as the Horlicks-loving petty thief in Rajinikanth’s Vettaiyan. But his character is largely one note, and his arc of redemption comes a little too late for us to feel any emotional payoff. Faasil and Ssara make a scrappy but sweetly unlikely team. But the film goes from sweet to syrupy a little too quickly, before their friendship has been sufficiently established on the page for us to feel the emotional weight of the climax.
Children’s films often have the deceptive ability to pack in big feelings and complex emotions that films made for adults often struggle to capture. But the film doesn't hardly troubles itself with depth, with big ideas of grief, belonging and loneliness remaining just concepts on paper. The children at this cinema hall, however, seemed to be giggling and peering into the screen on this October 2 holiday. The grown-ups, perhaps, needed a slightly different film.