This could have been a fun equivalent of a page-turner, but the non-linear narration and the stabs at rootedness keep playing spoilsport. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Imagine a fishing village right beside a sea with no fish. Worse, the men who go out to sea do not return, and the villagers whisper about a curse – as though a vengeful spirit has possessed this vast water body. That’s the imaginative setting of GV Prakash Kumar’s 25th film, Kingston. At first, we get a morally ambiguous hero, but when Kingston discovers that someone has been using him to smuggle drugs, something changes. He jumps into a fishing boat and goes to sea. This event is around the interval point, and this is where the title appears. So what occurs until then? Writer-director Kamal Prakash wants to immerse us in this environment. He tries to root his story with a ton of characters and a ton of atmosphere and a ton of backstory. So until that interval point, we keep going back and forth in time, getting some sort of history along with the coastal geography.
Is all this rooting necessary in a comic-book story? That’s the question that comes to mind after the rocky first half and the relatively okayish second half. In the latter portions, we get ghosts, the greed for gold, a murder mystery, a sea filled with skeletons, and a superb stretch of animation. The visual effects may be iffy, but look beyond that and you see the potential for a solid entertainer that actually has the capacity to be scary – as opposed to how this genre is typically treated in our cinema, as a horror-comedy. There’s some real magic in the way Kamal Prakash has conceived this story. But perhaps these stories should remain magical, without rooting or realism. They should feel like flipping through a comic book with pulp dialogues and brightly illustrated panels. The hero wants to buy a boat, so he can be on his own. This simple goal transforms into a quest to free his village of a curse. End of story.
But the telling is so convoluted that the simple pleasures we seek in this kind of movie are lost amidst the big emotional beats. Why was so-and-so character killed? Why was he even necessary in the first place? Why does the heroine (Divyabharathi) seem to have a purpose, only to be reduced to a participant in a duet? Why does the narration (which is already dense with information) move so quickly that the details don’t seem to matter after a point? Why do we have melodrama in a movie that needs none? Instead of emotion, what Kingston could have used is more convincing plotting. For instance, the underwater location of a mysterious coffin could have become the starting point of an Indiana Jones-style search. GV Prakash Kumar is effective in a part that has him play a character that’s older than he usually plays, but the real star of Kingston are some of the stormy visuals conjured up by the director and the cinematographer Gokul Benoy. We have the technology, we have the imagination. But when will we have the writing to match?
