Ace movie review: Vijay Sethupathi bolts through a game of gamble that doesn’t quite pay off

Ace movie plot

Bold Kannan (Vijay Sethupathi) is shown to have washed the traces of his past in India, while arriving to Malaysia. Carrying mysterious smile on his face, at the airport, he meets Arivu (Yogi Babu), a ragpicker who is under the garb of a businessman in front of his girlfriend Kalpana (Divya Pillai). Assuming Bold Kannan is a labourer, Arivu takes Kannan as his assistant. He meets Rukku (Rukmini Vasanth) who does odd jobs for a living and has to retrieve her parents’ house from abuser Raja Durai (Babloo Prithviraj). All this prompts Kannan and Arivu get into trouble after losing in a gambling stint to loan shark Dharma (BS Avinash), only for Kannan to plan a bigger heist making the motley of characters on a run.

Ace movie review

In a film that runs for two and half hours long, we are given multiple variations of Vijay Sethupathi’s backstory and his name. To Arivu, Kannan says he got the monicker ‘Bolt’ after he used to steal bolts from vehicles where conflicts happen and sell them for money. To Kalpana, he is ‘Bold’ Kannan because he is courageous to question the wrongdoings around him, and to Rukku, he is back to being ‘Bolt’ because his father had a fascination towards bolt that comes between the thunder and lightning. Do all these reasons sound one off and more importantly irrelevant, random, and out of context to the plot you read a few lines before? Well, if so, then you are in for more such through the course of the movie.

Set completely in Malaysia, Ace is a mix of genre; it has comedy, crime, action and all the commercial necessities. There is a woman in distress, not one but two villains who possess extra power both through judiciary and non-judiciary ways, a sidekick who gets into trouble (courtesy the hero), and the hero himself who gets to be the master of all trades, swoops in and saves the day. It is this very mix of all elements that make Ace a film that can become tad bit stretchy and prolonged that it doesn’t want to meet its conflict in modest way. As the title suggests, Ace is expected to be a genre that will talk more about the high and un-predictableness that the game of cards give. We get a portion of it, more so done in a hurry and feels clueless if you don’t know the game. But when you expect the film to delve more into it forming it as essence, Ace is quick to have another plan in action in form of a bank heist and subsequent obedient follow-up to a typical commercial template. Even as the film touches upon issues like sexual harassment and power dynamics, and the toiling nature of working class, it feels that Ace had wanted to bite more than it could chew, struggling to give an end knot to these threads.

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With Yogi Babu and Vijay Sethupathi at the centre, we do get some occasional laughs and the film appears to be lightly engaging in parts, but when you choose to sit for over two hours to watch a film that promises you more than just a bare engagement, Ace falls short. It is also admirable to see Vijay Sethupathi have some fun onscreen albeit limited. Rukmini Vasanth, who makes her Tamil debut with Ace, also gets some decent portions to perform, but thanks to her character, there isn’t much to add on. There is something lightful when she comes onscreen, and had those portions been extended, Ace would have been more endearing to watch.

Ace movie verdict

Ace wishes to be an entertainer, a film that does not want you to use logic and just rely in its magic and comforts and convenience of commercial cinema. While it manages to get there, it is not however fully satisfactory. It is a film that you wouldn’t mind watching, but not a one that would remind you what you had watched.