‘Revolver Rita’ movie review: Keerthy Suresh, Radikaa’s dark comedy becomes an endurance test

There must be a speakeasy graveyard for films like Revolver Rita, made because a writer convinced a star of the merit of a seemingly clever crime drama screenplay — of the routine gang wars, double-crosses, animal metaphors, corrupt cops, car chases, and innocent characters, all pieced together to produce a few twists along the way, and a random climactic reveal you see coming from miles away. In Revolver Rita, starring Keerthy Suresh, director JK Chandru fumbles telling one such tale, stripped to its banal denomination, creating a predictable crime-comedy that reads like ‘Tamil crime-comedies for dummies.’

A generic feud between two generic rival gangs leads a generic revenge-thirsty villain to hire a muscle, who in-turn hires a pimp, to trap the gangster father of his gangster enemy. I will refrain from using ‘generic’ now because the scene that follows seems salvages this generic (I tried) gangster-drama introduction by slowly pivoting into popcorn fun, for a bit. Instead of taking a left at an intersection and going to the fifth house on the right, the gangster Dracula Pandian (Super Subbarayan), seeing stars after a bong rip, takes the right and goes to the fifth house on the left — the house where chicken shop-owner Rita (Keerthy Suresh) lives with her short-fused but pious mother (Radikaa Sarathkumar) and two sisters. The situation escalates, and to protect her daughter from this stoned gunman, Rita’s mother whacks Pandian with a cooker top and inadvertently kills him.

Radikaa Sarathkumarand Keerthy Suresh in a still from ‘Revolver Rita’
| Photo Credit:
Think Music India/YouTube

This happens just hours before Rita’s niece’s birthday party, for which a colourful set of characters was invited. There is an idea here about a family hiding a dead body in plain sight at a children’s party, but director Chandru has his crosshairs on something else, so the party is shrunk into a montage song scene. (Interestingly, this is the second Tamil film this year to use a dead body as a MacGuffin after Bomb, but Revolver Rita disappointingly doesn’t offer Pandian’s corpse even on-screen life, as he remains out of sight for much of the film). Outside, the muscle hired (Kalyan Master needed a meatier role) to kill Pandian, plans to extract the body from the house and get his due payment of Rs. 5 crores from Reddy (Ajay Ghosh), who wants to ‘gift’ Pandian’s severed head to the latter’s son, Bobby (Sunil, stone-faced throughout) as revenge for killing his brother.

Now, you may wonder what the big deal is about Rita’s situation; after all, she could have just approached the cops, since this is a clear case of an accidental murder in self-defence. This is where director Chandru expects you to suspend your disbelief, and whether you buy into this reasoning or find it a tad too contrived determines how you will feel about the rest of the film. It so happens that Rita had rubbed shoulders the wrong way with a despicable cop (John Vijay doing John Vijay things) who is itching for payback, and so going to the police isn’t an option. Rita plans to dispose of the body, Bobby vows to find his father, there are double-crosses, Redin Kingsley’s shenanigans, and lots of fun… or that should have been the case.

Revolver Rita should have been a wacky cat-and-mouse with ample dark humour, and there are remnants of that dream throughout the film — in fact, Radikaa’s comic timing becomes cardinal marks in these dull waters. The structure for a taut crime-comedy that doesn’t beat around the bush is there, but Chandru doesn’t build on it. While characters and situations are crafted with potential for some good old macabre humour, the means to achieve the end aren’t all there on paper. It’s as if the writer settled for clever plot points and didn’t bother to build the connecting tissues.

Keerthy Suresh, Sunil, Radikaa Sarathkumar and others in a still from ‘Revolver Rita’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

The writing, after the intermission mark, turns quite flat, and the humour dries up too, worsened by a boring stretch at a police station and a subsequent car-chase. Like an early reveal of Rita’s relationship with a deceased man, some awfully-placed ideas turn this already predictable story stale — it’s like playing Russian roulette, knowing the bullet in the cylinder is a squib load.

During the intermission, a fellow audience member likened the storytelling experience to listening to a crime-comedy modulated into a children’s tale, and I coudn’t help but agree. In the end, whatever had made me chuckle was from this dark comedy lugging around a story as lifeless as the corpse at its centre.

Revolver Rita is currently running in theatres

Published – November 28, 2025 01:20 pm IST