Custody: Thanks to Venkat Prabhu’s indulgences, Naga Chaitanya’s bilingual bites the dust

The number of Tamil-Telugu bilinguals featuring top stars have shot up in the recent decade. Despite tasting only marginal success, producers continue to back them with enthusiasm. The reason is quite simple - he/she gets to make two projects at the price of one, the business opportunities multiply even while they take the risk of pleasing audiences across two regions with the same product.

In the previous decade among bilinguals, only a rare film like Sir and the critical acclaim surrounding Oopiri, Oke Oka Jeevitham have offered some solace for the makers. Some of the biggest disappointments among bilinguals were undoubtedly Spyder, The Warriorr, while films like U Turn, Game Over, Anaamika were rejected by audiences. Another infamous addition to this list is Custody.

Despite choosing universal subjects for their stories, filmmakers need to realise it’s the treatment that makes the cut. Knowing the pulse of your core audience is necessary for a project to gain widespread acceptance. In terms of the dialogue timing, characterisation, song placement, pacing and the staging, Custody is an unfathomable potpourri that disregards the tastes of Telugu audiences.

Custody, despite having a fabulous plot revolving around a police constable’s fight to protect the truth and safeguarding a criminal, is diluted by Venkat Prabhu’s pointless indulgences. Instead of preserving the soul of his story and sustaining the momentum in the narration, the filmmaker keeps distracting audiences with unnecessary subplots, dark humour, songs.

The idea to lend an emotional connect to Shiva’s fight is interesting but the flashback lands amidst a tense scenario and is devoid of a strong impact. Even if the ending is fairly satisfactory, the journey towards the culmination is a royal mess. When the director in his promotional interviews mentioned that he’s stayed away from his trademark quirks and dark humour in Custody, he didn’t quite mean it. He may have done the film as a one-off experiment, but one hopes he learns the right lessons from it and sticks to his strengths.