Revolver Rita doesn't use its comic potential to its fullest and ends up a passable comedy that could have used more bite, observes Arjun Menon.
Revolver Rita has an interesting enough story to hook you.
A woman and her family are dragged into the world of gang wars, after an interaction with a gangster.
Revolver Rita tries to be a black comedy but falls flat due to the overwrought writing, though some of the subversions work in favour of the film.
Rita (Keerthi Suresh) leads a normal life alongside her family, consisting of her sisters and widowed mother (Radhika Sarathkumar).
Their world is shattered with the arrival of a small-time gangster at their doorstep. Some unfortunate events lead to Rita being pushed into an ongoing gang war, with her family, with no one to fend for them.
The initial setup is intriguing as you get a few ladies tasked with solving a crime, and meet an ensemble of weird, caricaturish gangsters.
The woman also has a past with their dead father that ties back to dealings with a local land mafia.
This is the kind of film where the tonal mismatch between the material and the predicament of the characters caught at the mercy of seemingly clueless but deadly gangster business is glaring.
Rita is forced to partake in the illegal affairs of the gang and make sure that she prevents leaking out a terrible secret that could destroy them forever.
The film tries to be too many things at once. It wants to be a laugh out loud comedy that thrives on eccentric performances and over-the-top acting, but at the same time, also wants you to feel the freshness of its setting as a searing gangster drama with a twist.
Revolver Rita fails to make the laughs count for anything more than sporadic outbursts as the writing is too flat to make any real impact.
There is a play with a group of women trying to hide the dead body akin to the classic female-centric comedy Magalir Mattum (1994). There are also shades of Nelson Dilipkumar's Kolamaavu Kokila in the way the family dynamic is etched out and how the drab humour plays out in between these characters.
But Revolver Rita is too busy trying to be funny and a tense subversion of the tropes of gangster films that nothing lands as intended.
Scenes play out with unintentionally comedic performances and the actors can be seen struggling to meet the tonal requirements of the genre.
Typically, a film with a gangster son on the lookout for his missing mob boss dad with a buffoonish set of gangster cronies and a clueless cop on the trail should be ideal for an entertaining romp. But Revolver Rita simplifies and stereotypes its own central idea by throwing in untoward character details and quirky elements.
Keerthy Suresh is effective as Rita and has the necessary star power to carry this loud, bombastic film.
She is not given much by the material, but is well cast as the female hero who has to save the day.
It's nice to see a female star who is able to command the screen and she manages to captivate with some intrigue in the latter half.
Radhika Sarathkumar is perfectly pitted alongside Keerthi as the sometimes unhinged mother. She gets to walk away with some of the jokes that rely on her physicality.
Redin Kingsley, Ajay Ghosh and Sunil as 'Dracula Bobby' are funny on screen and do their very best to elevate the sometimes flat material with over-the-top shenanigans.
The film uses the gang wars as an effect for upscaling its narrative, but there is none of the observed humour that would make such a weird combination work.
For instance, the gangster played by Redin Kingsley and a bunch of others have identifiable quirks as caricatures, but the over-the-top antics somewhat become grating with repetition.
Nelson Dilipkumar was able to inject a lot of panache and minimalist humour to Kolamaavu Kokila with his deadpan affectations. But writer-director J K Chandru, who seems influenced by the Nayanthara starrer, fails to make the deadpan tone work here.
Everything is a loud revelation and nothing is underplayed.
Sean Rolden's score infuses the necessary energy to the confusion comedy, without being overbearing.
Revolver Rita feels like the third or fourth draft iteration of a much more engaging exercise in genre subversion.
The ideas are all there but could have been integrated better to yield a film that offers more laughs and the necessary thrills within its own weird world building.
But the film does not use its inherent comic potential to its fullest and ends up being a passable comedy that could have used more bite.
© 2025