Remember the feeling when you catch up with old friends after a long time? It is such nostalgia that the awkwardly-titled Chennai 6000028 II: Second Innings evokes to give us a jolly good time. The boys are back and they are men this time. When the film opens, we find that a few of them are married, some have moved to different cities for work, and there is no time for cricket and hanging out. But there is yearning for the good old days. And then comes news of their teammate Ragu’s (Jai) marriage, to be held in Theni, offering them an opportunity to get together at last. And cricket, too, comes back into their dull lives when they clash with Marudhupandi (Vaibhav), a local who is crazy about cricket (or rather winning at all cost), and his friend Ganeshan (Abhinay Vaddi), who secretly wants to marry Anu (Sana Althaf), Ragu’s lover-fiancée.
The success of Chennai 6000028 II: Second Innings lies in how smartly Venkat Prabhu weaves in the elements that we loved in the first film even though the setting and the dramatic angle of this film is different. Venkat Prabhu retains the themes that made the earlier film a modern-day cult classic — our obsessions with cricket and friendships — and also addresses his characters’ problems as adults, which an audience that has watched the previous film in their growing up years can relate to very well now — how do you hold on to the very things that have defined your life even after marriage? Here, we see the married men — Karthik (Shiva, whose one-liners are spectacular sixers), Pazhani (Nitinsathyaa), Gopi (Vijay Vasanth) and Ezhumalai (Ajay Raj) struggling to act as responsible adults while yearning to be their happy-go-lucky younger selves. That they are also largely henpecked husbands (much like the friends in Panchathanthiram) makes their case pitiful. Only the conflict involving Ragu’s marriage feels generic.
( 3.5 / 5 )