For about its first 20 minutes or so, Marainthirunthu Parkkum Marmam Enna reminds us of a similar film it its genre, the 2016 crime thriller Metro. As in that film, we are introduced to a gang of chain-snatching criminals. The film gives us their modus operandi in detail – how they train, how they choose their victim, the place to commit their crime, their getaway tactics and most importantly, what happens to the jewels that they rob. We get these details when the protagonist Japan (Dhruvva) has a run-in with Jeeva (Ramachandran Durairaj). He snatches jewellery from the latter, who himself is a member of a gang headed by Mattai (Mime Gopi). In the following scenes, we see him becoming a member of this gang, and learning the ropes.
These scenes are gritty and promise an intense crime film, more so when Japan’s attempt at chain snatching goes wrong and Bharathi (Aishwarya Dutta) sees his face! With the victim being the wife of the commissioner, even the cops are after him. The commissioner beings in hard-nosed cop Dilip Chakravarthy (JD Chakravarthi) to investigate the crimes.
But then, the tone begins to soften. The film starts trading grit for sentiments and later, heroism. The tone progressively becomes mainstream. We get a revenge drama, with a mandatory flashback. Saranya Ponvannan features in this, as Japan’s (we learn that his actual name is Aiyappan) mom, and does her shtick as the naïve-but-gold-hearted mother – and she still makes it work. But the punch in the earlier scenes goes missing. By the time we reach the climax, we realise that the film has turned out to be a watered down version of the crime drama that initially promised to be.
