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'Dragon' Movie Review: Pradeep Ranganathan is Pitch Perfect in this Wonderfully Old-School Morality Tale
'Dragon' is a charming movie filled with so much old-fashioned goodness that the last filmmaker to take you into this space was vintage Rajkumar Hirani.
Director: Ashwath Marimuthu
Writer: Ashwath Marimuthu
Cast: Pradeep Ranganathan, Anupama Parameswaran, Mysskin, Gautham Vasudev Menon, Kayadu Lohar, George Maryan
Language: Tamil
There’s a character in filmmaker Ashwath Marimuthu's Dragon who the protagonist D Raghavan or Dragon (Pradeep Ranganathan) refers to simply as "Owner". Now, Owner is short for house owner and in their tiny 10-second interaction, we learn basic details like how Dragon and his parents have been staying in this rented home for 15 years, how cramped it is, and how Dragon’s relationship with Owner has never evolved in all these years.
This scene conveys a lot, including the information we need to understand about why Dragon’s parents are unable to raise a certain amount of money for him. For a regular writer, the purpose of the Owner character could have ended there, but not for Marimuthu; it’s because of this interaction that we feel a sense of achievement when Dragon finally moves into his own house. Later, the same Owner returns to the screenplay when he helps Dragon’s parents in a time of need.
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As a craft, it’s easy to notice the intricacies in Marimuthu’s writing that give an insignificant character this beautiful payoff. But if you dig deeper, Owner isn’t too much of a departure from the character Vijay Sethupathi played in Marimuthu’s debut Oh My Kadavule. Sethupathi played God in that film, but in Dragon, the Gods are many, including Owner. And if Vijay Sethupathi presented Arjun (Ashok Selvan) with a Golden Ticket to give him a shot at redemption, Dragon gets a ticket too, just that this time it’s a hall ticket.
Speaking broadly, this film is also written around the protagonist’s redemption arc. When it opens, we see Dragon devolve from an innocent nerd to the college bad boy, just so he can impress a girl. He’s a standard-issue Arjun Reddy wannabe, an overachiever at under-achieving. And when we first see him with a girl, he cannot take his eyes off her hips. He has also failed in all his exams, and is termed a cautionary tale during the principal's speech on the first day of college.
Naturally, we might assume that his journey towards redemption begins right when he gets kicked out of college. But Dragon is a beast when it comes to being a loser. This film doesn’t so much follow one arc as it follows a series of them, and each time we feel Dragon has hit rock bottom, we see the man stay the same. Imagine how frustrating it is for us to invest in a character with zero redeeming qualities and to witness life give him one shot at redemption after another.
However, it’s this one aspect of Dragon that makes it incredibly engaging. So, it's not so much that Dragon doesn’t work hard to get out of this loop of failure, but it's that he never stops believing in shortcuts. As a morality tale, the message is as old as the hills, but when it's written around a character like Dragon’s, we feel like the film doesn’t ever get an ending. He might move from one arc to the next, but it’s unlikely he would ever fully stop making mistakes.
But despite what could easily have turned into a preachy, soapy melodrama, the film never stops being anything less than hilarious. If Dragon himself provides the laughs in the first half, we then move into a space where he’s surrounded by a series of genuinely funny characters. Of course, there are individual portions that might feel far-fetched, but when it's succeeded by a joke, we hardly get the time to decide if a scene made sense or not.
This is most true in a particularly long sequence involving Dragon having to drive six hours to not get caught for lying. But when all the aforementioned characters are added to this scene, we do not realise how easily it could have backfired.
The result is a charming movie filled with so much old-fashioned goodness that the last filmmaker to take you into this space was vintage Rajkumar Hirani. All of this is held together wonderfully by the performances, including those who got to play the tiny roles, like the actor who played Owner, or Dragon’s friends, who are a lot like him but also extremely sincere. There’s also so much Mysskin adds to this film by playing the role of the principal that you’re at once mad at him for making life so hard for Dragon, but also love him for doing what’s right.
But eventually, this is a film that belongs to Ranganathan as much as it does to Marimuthu. Not only do we feel the full transformation of a thoroughly unlikeable manchild as he finally comes of age, but through Ranganathan, we also see a man so blinded by his idea of success that he’s incapable of seeing the everyday Gods that make up his life. Besides all the wonderful writing in Dragon that gives you the feeling of receiving a warm hug, the biggest miracle is also that Tamil cinema finally has a movie in which a character is allowed to pass out of engineering college.