'Revolver Rita' Movie Review: A Lazy Comedy That Comes 15 Years Too Late

There was a time in Tamil cinema when films like Revolver Rita may have been considered “cool”. This must have been around the early 2010s, when the first generation of Tamil filmmakers graduated from the Broadband Downloads School of Modern Cinema. Of course, they all cultivated their tastes with modern classics, but somewhere down the line, films of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie became the most important names in their taste-making. Revolver Rita, in all fairness, appears to be a film that was found in one of the old Seagate hard disks of that era.

It comes with all the attempts at trying to make everything look cool and quirky. This includes a lot of low-hanging fruit, like that of a small-time gangster, who appears wearing the same t-shirt throughout the film. The phrase, “Love And Love Only”, is what’s written on it, in an obvious reference to Fazil’s Vijay romance Kadhalukku Mariyadhai (1997). The film tries to do something clever with this, but by the time it gets there, the punchline needed to be epic for it to have mattered. The film often forgets that we’ve seen hundreds of similar movies by now that a lazy pop-cultural reference is enough to make us laugh. This applies to almost all the earlier portions of Revolver Rita, which is fundamentally a Tarantino-styled twist on the basic plot of Weekend at Bernie’s (1989).

The only aspect that could have saved Revolver Rita is the comedic chemistry between Keerthy Suresh (Rita) and Radhika Sarathkumar, who plays Rita's mother. But even the writing around their eccentricities does not get any support because the plot itself is forced and chaotic. Which means that even the clever-on-paper idea to make Rita a real baddie only comes alive when she spells it out in as many words. We’re meant to be thrilled at her cunning machinations and how she manipulates her way out of trouble, and yet these ideas appear too silly and add nothing to the film.

Actors such as Redin Kingsley, Sunil and Ajay Ghosh play iterations of characters they’ve all done several times before, and by the time the film arrives at a joke at their expense, we’ve already gotten there minutes ago. What’s left is a desperate attempt at making a certain kind of movie, with the assumption that it would appeal to a certain audience that cannot differentiate between funny and forced.