Dude Review: Thirst Trap Gone Horribly Wrong

I was so befuddled by this movie that I looked up the dictionary definition of dude. According to Cambridge it is any man, or one who comes from a city and dresses in a stylish way. 

Two things that confused me were ‘man’ and ‘stylish.’ 

So Agan (Pradeep Ranganathan, a poor man’s Dhanush-meets-Rajinikanth) is the aforementioned dude (less man and more emaciated bear) who gatecrashes his ex’s wedding and somehow ends up shirtless and is then rescued by his first cousin (his Minister Uncle’s daughter) and continues to be shirtless for the next 10 minutes (in not a nice way) and then is clothed by said Minister Uncle (Sarath Kumar), who is now shirtless with man boobs, and you don’t know what is worse. 

Agan likes to be fed by his mother, feed strays in his neighbourhood, engineer surprises for random people for their anniversaries and birthdays and looks like he is angling for endorsements for sunglasses (of which he has many, but they all look the same), bathing bars and chocolate. I thought he had a low blood sugar situation, as he keeps chomping on chocolate bars and it would be woven into the plot, but what plot? 

Now the rescuer cousin in the first scene, Kural (Mamitha Baiju) is in love with Agan and wants to marry him and so she proposes to him in full public view in a metro train, no less, and Agan says yes, because how can he look bad in front of so many people? But then, when only the dogs are watching, he tells her he has zero feelings for her. So, the next day she ups and leaves for a foreign land. 

If Dude was the satire it is made out to be, I was too over-stimulated and exhausted to notice it. Even doomscrolling on Instagram is more relaxing than this. And keeping pace with Agan’s epiphanies (to marry or not to marry the cousin) was exhausting on another level as was decoding his facial expressions (of which there are three). Sometimes he wields a gun, and it turns out to be a chocolate bar he chomps on, and at other times, Minister uncle wields a gun, and it is an actual gun. But these technicalities shouldn’t get in the way of the plot (whatever that is). 

Soon Agan realizes his mistake when a whole clan of employees in uniform (his event management company perhaps?) ask him why he rejected such a nice girl. So Agan arrives at Kural's doorstep to make amends and ask for her hand again. Meanwhile she has found a second suitor who she wants to marry and when she mentions it to Minister Daddy, he asks what caste he’s from. When she says, ‘not our caste’, he gets ready for some honour killing in the same manner that he killed his sister who wanted to marry a lowly. It’s interesting how he was totally okay with inbreeding when Kural wanted to marry Agan. So now it is agreed that Agan and Kural will have a ‘fake marriage’ to appease the Minister Daddy, and then Agan will ensure she is reunited with her love and pack her off to one of 53 countries where they have visa on arrival. Except Kural’s new suitor doesn’t have a passport. 

I must applaud the confidence of the whole gang, from Pradeep Ranganathan to Mamitha Baiju to Sarath Kumar to the director and writer of story, screenplay and dialogue (Keerthiswaran) to believe in this work (if one can call it that) enough to set it free. Till the end, I couldn’t tell if it was a dark comedy or a bad joke. My money is on the latter.