Friday, December 9, 2022

Hiatus!

 I'm off to Edinburgh for a few weeks.  Content will resume in January.

Saturday, December 3, 2022

That's not how any of this works.

Indian cinema is known for its wild shifts in genre, but Jack N' Jill (2022) really commits to its wild shift in genre. It might not be enough to make it a good movie, but it does at least make it a somewhat more interesting movie.

Kesh (Kalidas Jayaram) is a brilliant scientist who has invented Kuttaaps (Soubin Shahir), a fully functional AI in a box.  he returns to India, accompanied by Kuttaaps and his Norwegian assistant Cheorlett (Ida Sophie Straume), reunites with his grandfather (Nedumudi Venu) and a gaggle of childhood friends, meets his nosy neighbor Tara (Shaylee Krishen), and builds a laboratory out in the forest so that he can complete his father's dream project, Jack N' Jill.


The Jack N' Jill project deals with brain augmentation; according to Kesh, humans use only 10% of their brains but the Jack N' Jill process can raise that to 100%!  This is, of course, complete nonsense that has been thoroughly debunked, and yet that's not the worst science in the movie - it's not even the worst science in that scene!  Kesh wants to skip animal testing and start testing the system on humans.  Specifically, he wants a human with "weak neural connections", and who is not aware that the experiment is taking place.


One of Kesh's buddies is Ravi (Basil Joseph), a man with shady connections and apparently no moral compass.  Ravi promises to find a subject and returns with Anthrappan (Indrans), a man with dementia who believes he's being taken to see his dead wife.  Stage One of Jack N' Jill goes horribly wrong, downloading a large packet of historical data directly into Anthrappan's brain, and he runs off into the forest shouting about Hitler.  Kesh and his team sort of shrug and start looking for their next subject.


Subject Number Two is Parvathy (Manju Warrier), a woman who is so traumatized that she's lost most of her memory, can no longer speak, and carries an iron with her everywhere she goes.  Kesh hooks some electrodes to her scalp, and after a short VR sequence she's speaking, singing, and dancing, and displaying an eclectic range of knowledge.  And you might be thinking, "Oh, it's Bollywood Flowers For Algernon," but no, it's about to get much weirder.


Phase Two involves bombarding Parvathy's brain with images of war and violent conflict.  According to Kesh, further traumatizing the already traumatized woman will give her "advanced survival skills," which is important for some reason.

It's about this time when Kesh meets Steven Tharakan (Sunil Varghese), a local businessman, and Stephen invites him to a talent show.  The original plan is for Parvathy to give a speech about freedom, because kesh has seen My fair Lady one too many times, but Parvathy doesn't want to give a speech so instead the group put together a quick Jazz number.  And during the Jazz number Stephen's son Joseph (Gokul Anand) makes unwanted advances to Tara, so Parvathy steps off the stage, knocks him out with her trusty iron, and collapses.


That's a problem, because Stephen and Joseph are evil businessmen, with a small army of violent goons at their beck and call, and it's increasingly clear that they have something to do with whatever traumatized Parvathy in the first place.  The only person who seems to know what happened is Stephen's adopted daughter Arathi (Esther Anil), but she's trapped in her father's shadow and unable to say anything.

Fortunately, it seems that Parvathy really did pick up incredible fighting skills from Phase Two, because  suddenly the movie is a violent revenge drama in which Parvathy keeps sneaking away from the group to deal with Stephen's men one by one after they try to bury her alive.  And yeah, the bad guys are genuinely vile, and it's viscerally satisfying to see Parvathy take them out through a combination of her newfound martial arts skills, Indian classical dance, and her trusty iron. 


(Also there's a cursory romantic subplot involving Tara's apparently hopeless love for Kesh, but that's treated as an afterthought.)

Ironically, Jack N' Jill is much less horrifying when it's a brutal revenge drama than when it's  a wacky sci-fi comedy about a handsome scientist and his annoying AI sidekick performing unethical experiments without the consent of their test subjects.  The bad guys definitely deserve an iron to the head, but Kesh really ought to be in jail.