'Drishyam' - A tight plot let down by a weak cast

There were collective goosebumps when Drishyam, the Malayalam original, was remade into other south Indian languages.

The life of a cable operator suddenly became the stuff thrillers were made of. A school dropout — whose worldly wisdom comes mostly from the movies he watches at his cable office — proved that mind games were enough to swing open adrenaline floodgates.

Enter Ajay Devgn with the Hindi version and he pales several shades in comparison with — Mohanlal (Drishyam, Malayalam), Ravichandran (Drishya, Kannada), Venkatesh (Drushyam, Telugu) and Kamal Haasan (Papanasam, Tamil).

First, Devgn is too sophisticated to play a fourth class fail. Second, Goa is too odd a place to plant the premise of an everyman film. Third, siren Shriya Saran is terribly miscast as a mother of two. It doesn’t help either that she makes zero effort to look one.

In effect, a watertight plot is diluted by an unconvincing bunch of actors.
Relief arrives late, in the form of Tabu, a cop investigating the disappearance of her son. She has reasons to grill Devgn, but the investigation leads nowhere without any evidence.

Devgn goes to great lengths to protect his family, but Tabu, the torture-happy IG, is in hot pursuit.

Drishyam evokes lots of curiosity with its blurring line between right and wrong. But it could have been more engrossing with a different set of performers.
Give us the original any day.