If you though that the life of a Don was easy,then you are mistaken. There are hard decisions to be taken all the time. In the professional front, you have to decide, which hand and which leg of the enemy has to be chopped. In the personal front, you have to protect your sister from your enemies and also from the fact that she is not your sister. Still Madhavan (Suresh Gopi) juggles all this successfully and how he does this is the premise of the movie.
Madhavan was taken under the wings of Don Shekharan (Murali) when he was a kid. At this point, we thought that Sekharan would be killed by a rival gang and Madhavan would kill all of them by throwing English words. First time director B Unnikrishnan surprised us by not going down that cliched path. He also surprised us with some family drama and a great twist in the plot involving Sekharan’s family members.
A Don family cannot exist in isolation. There has to rivals and there has to be police officers. Smart City has all of them and the interplay between them takes the narration forward. The name of the movie comes from the Smart City project that we all have heard about and in the movie the rival faction tries to do a land deal against the declared motives. People from whom the land was taken get a raw deal and thus the Dons with the heart of gold, Sekharan and Madhavan take action. Then there are murders and counter-murders, but then a twist in the narrative happens which holds Madhavan back. Then the twist is unwound through some family melodrama and all ends well.
Suresh Gopi plays a subduded Don, where he does not verbally abuse people, but instead keeps things moving by beating the pulp out of them. If that does not attract you – he has a new hair style. He does not have a love interest in the movie and both Lakshmi Gopalaswamy and Gopika play his sisters.
Like any other Suresh Gopi movie, three fourths of Malayalam industry is in the movie. They include Rajan P Dev (cameo as Achyutanandan), Siddique, Jayasurya, Gopika, Lakshmi Gopalswamy, Rajmohan Unnithan, Shammi Thilakan, Kunjan, Manoj K Jayan and sundry other gooda looking characters who get terrible deaths. In Suresh Gopi movies, like Rajnikanth movies, it does not matter who else is there for they all have to push Suresh Gopi to get in front of the camera to get their 10 on screen minutes.
Ultimately there is only one question about a Suresh Gopi movie. It is not about the story or artistic content, but something simpler: Is it watchable or will you become a Don after seeing it? Smart City is definitely watchable and it helps if you have seen Pathaka before it. B Unnikrishnan has done a good job with the story, screen play, dialogue and direction and if he had cut out the songs, it would have been better.
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“Smart City” is watchable indeed, except for Manoj K Jayan and his antics. Especially striking was Lakshmi Gopalaswamy’s small part.
It was a much better movie, but as the reviewer said, it could have been made a little more tight. The songs were really not needed.