Mark Antony (Telugu) Review

The time-travel genre gets its most unhinged film yet. Director Adhik Ravichandran's Mark Antony is an action-comedy so loud and chaotic that its screenings may have registered on Richter scales. The long list of eccentricities in this double-double-action film where Vishal Menon and S J Suryah both play fathers and sons, includes an AI-generated Silk Smitha, an elderly crossdresser in pink-ribboned pigtails, and a truck-sized machine gun named Anaconda. The main attraction, though, is a sci-fi telephone that allows one to make calls to the past.

When this gadget (shame that it is never christened - it's simply called "the phone") falls in the hands of Mark (Vishal), he dials up his father Antony (also Vishal) 20 years into the past to save him from getting murdered. Once a fearsome duo of dons, Antony and his best friend Jackie (S J Suryah) saw their criminal partnership end when Antony was killed in a club, leaving Mark an orphan who grew up in Jackie uncle's shadow as a meek bike mechanic, while Jackie's son Madan (also S J Suryah) was groomed to become a don.

The story is set up so that Mark's and Madan's fates are inversely correlated based on how events unfold on this one fateful night at the club. If Mark calls his father on the time-travel phone and warns him of the ambush, he can reverse the trajectory of his own life. In this new timeline, Mark would be a don, and Madan, a mechanic. And Madan would get the girl - Ramya (Ritu Varma) - and Mark wouldn't. So Mark and Madan squabble for control of the phone, calling their fathers and sending tips from the future. An air of confusion and comedy prevails. Adding to the plot's disorientating effect are the arbitrary rules that this "time-travel" phone comes with. Only one call is allowed to a given day in the past. And the person using the phone gets hoisted a few feet above the air - but only the first time they use it (because the CGI budget apparently couldn't be stretched far enough).

Abinandhan Ramanujam's cinematography vividly resurrects the Technicolor extravagance of the 1970s, immersing the past scenes set inside the club in a riot of visual elements. Lights flash and confetti rains down on men wearing bad wigs, laughing evil laughs, and fighting each other with guns that get progressively larger in size.

Mark Antony is riotously funny in parts and deeply offensive in others. Its moment of peak-cringe comes when an AI Silk Smitha arrives, seeking Antony's protection against predators. Her face has that wispy ephemeral quality common to AI art; her teeth are fused into a sheet of white; and when she speaks she does so with the poorly-chosen dubbing voice of a child. The whole scene is as random and ill-conceived as the Pawan Kalyan propaganda injected at a dinner table scene.

Moderation is the enemy #1 on the sets of Mark Antony as characters screech dialogues with an exaggerated flair and there is not a moment of rest or calm. S J Suryah who plays young Madan as well as his father Jackie plays it the most cuckoo of all. His quirkiness is topped only by Vishal who is unrecognisable as a bald, tattooed and ducktail-bearded older Antony - a flashy character whose favorite tic is to vibrate like a bobblehead. Amongst these gaudy displays, Ritu Varma who plays Mark's love interest Ramya is lost and forgotten.

Mark Antony is such an all-out assault on the senses, you will be well-warned to brace yourself for this tinnitus-causing indulgence. But its plot, convoluted though it may seem, makes the grade for a sci-fi-driven crass comedy.