Not much to party about…

Two years after ‘Premam’, the cult Malayalam movie which was a raging hit world over, rebellious campus films have caught the attention of film makers. The most recent example is that of ‘Arjun Reddy’ which too did very well commercially. The formula for these films has been highly predictable.

With a devil-may-care attitude, the hero is shown freely roaming around the college premises as if he owns it. The heroine is either a simpering belle adoring him for his machismo or one that he has loved and lost. Invariably, the rest of the characters in and around the leading pair are carefree to the point of being reckless. There is internecine violence, drunken brawls, melodrama, petty politicking and a teary farewell when it all ends.

Directed by Sharan Koppisetty, ‘Kirrak Party’, a remake of the Kannada original ‘Kirik Party’ released more than a year ago follows the same beaten track. An overweight and slightly overage Nikhil Siddharth is seen as a mechanical engineering student, with a gang of friends, who are typically directionless and chasing skirts all around. Enters the heroine

(Simran Pareenja), a student shown as a strange mix of a writer-cum-linguist and the entire college swoons over her. Before sparks fly between the batchmates, she trips over from the college building and dies. From here on, even as the first half moves on lifelessly, the hero sports a bushy beard, a typical fashion statement of Gen Y nowadays and becomes a law unto himself.

The film too moves on like a zombie, typically moving in and out of artificially inserted situations to showcase the powerful person that the hero becomes as he wins elections, makes one of his juniors ( Samyuktha Hegde) go nuts over him and recollects his bitter sweet memories with his first love. There is no convincing explanation why he turns a new leaf as the film ends, with his network of friends uniting like good old times and singing the farewell song.

One is not sure how this film caught the fancy of the Kannada audience, where it seems to have done whopping business and counted as among one of the all-time hits. Somehow, despite the nativity factor weaved in, the flick fails to keep the viewer engaged as the proceedings have a pedestrian feel to it. The stereotyped depiction of engineering students as wayward and flippant and the girl students as mere eye candy is again too commonplace.