After all the damnifying reviews and failure flags, Revolver Rita comes to us on Netflix. This is the lovely Keerthy Suresh’s second “comedy” in 2025 which audiences found nothing to laugh about. I certainly found my giggle moments in RR (Revolver Rita) far more frequent than in the humourless dud Uppu Kappurambu which came at the start of 2025. That was like tickling a corpse to get it animated.
RR is more intelligently written. I like the thought of four women, three sisters and their mother under one rickety roof, trying to protect themselves from a truckload of gangsters and their goons.
Don’t ask, who’s who. I couldn’t keep track of the Dracula Pandians and Cheetas, all looking like they could do with a shower, none seeming to be as intimidating as they think themselves to be, they are more scruffy than scary.
I wish director JK Chandru had clung to the spoofy mood all through rather than allow the violence to get real. Some characters actually get shot and yes, there is “real” blood. That seems oddly incongruous in a film where four women struggle to lug a dead gangster’s corpse into their modest refrigerator while the mother wonders what happens to her dosa mix in the fridge.
Radhika Sarathkumar is a hoot as the mother. Her mood swings, and the way she plays the widowed-mother-with-three-daughters card whenever in a spot, is just about the funniest gag in the bag. The rest is ho-hum, some okay some not. You win some samosas, you lose some dosas.
While Radhika steals the show with her strident, shrieking performance, Keerthy is better with her comic timing than nearly the entire cast. There is a classic comedienne concealed in her persona,waiting to be lucidly manifested given a better script.
Here Keerthy struggles with her lines and the turbulent situations in the plot which demand more of her charm than she can muster.
The flashy frames resemble the chaotic splash made by a kindergarten rebel. The mood is disruptive. The directors wants us to reach into the chaos and make ourselves as comfortable as possible. But there is too much happening here that is of no consequence.
Some of the writing is clearly unmonitored and superfluous. The cunning wicked cop Kamraj (John Vijay) is projected as “funny evil” then “evil evil” and finally as “evil loser”, the three stages of his character being coarsely and tactlessly divorced from one another.
What Revolver Rita lack is stability. It thinks tossing the creepy characters around in a villainous tedium amounts to bravura writing. In reality the plot is one-note: four women accidently kill a criminal on the evening of a birthday party, and then try to get rid of the body.
While we try to get rid of the growing feeling that the plot may have worked in the story room, but fails to take off in execution.
