Con City Review: Heist Comedy That Keeps Misfiring

Con City has a fun premise and a handful of clever scams, but its biggest con is failing to convince you it’s smarter than it really is, observes Sreeju Sudhakaran.

Con City, helmed by first-time director Harish Durairaj, is a comic heist thriller about a family of con artistes whose very familial identity is a fraud.

It is definitely an interesting idea. Exploring how and why these previously disconnected individuals — save two of them — are living together as a family offers enough intrigue and, on the whole, there are a few clever ideas and moments that make Con City watchable to an extent.

Even though it behaves like a heist movie, particularly in the second half, Con City hates the word ‘heist’ and has its characters insist that they are pulling off scams.

Potato, potahto, you can say.

But I agree with the film, there is indeed a scam going on.

The scam is what the movie is doing to itself by believing it is smart enough to hoodwink the viewer into thinking it is smarter than it actually is.

Manasilaayo?

Before I explain the ‘scam’, let me talk about the scam story.

The Scam Story

When the movie begins, we meet a seemingly dysfunctional family comprising husband Saravanan (Arjun Das), wife Mithra (Anna Ben), their physically disabled six-year-old son Jeeva (Akilan), Mithra’s mother Janaki (Vadivukkarasi), and her brother Jackie (Yogi Babu), living together and running a hotel in Mangalapuram.

But when the kid is abducted from school, we soon realise they aren’t really a family, except for Janaki and Jackie.

They are actually con artistes who fled Chennai a few years ago and have been forced to live together. Why they pretend to be a family, and how their past has led to Jeeva’s abduction, forms the rest of the plot.

Con City is set across two timelines. Most of the first half unfolds in 2010, while the second half shifts to 2017. I assume the reason is because the movie is loosely inspired by real-life scams.

The actual reason may simply be that the present technological advancements and government initiatives would have rendered a few of these cons obsolete. Fastag, for instance.

I also wish the film had been more careful with real-life timelines. During the 2010 portions, there is a sequence centred around the release of Enthiran, along with a sparsely amusing bit where Saravanan uses ‘Rajinikanth‘ to get himself out of a tight spot.

That’s fine, but just a few scenes earlier, a character mentions wanting to watch Rockstar, a film that came out a year later.

For a movie whose protagonists meticulously plan every move to avoid getting caught, Con City should have been equally careful about such slip-ups.

The Setup Takes Its Time

It takes time for Con City to build momentum. Once the main flashback portion begins, we are shown the separate lives of the protagonists and why they are drawn into the world of scams.

Saravanan works for the electricity board, is drowning in debt, and is under pressure from his girlfriend to marry. A pregnant Mithra is cheated out of her rented house and finds herself broke and homeless. Jackie needs money for Janaki’s surgery.

They all have understandable reasons to be financially desperate, but their sudden leap into high-stakes fraud isn’t particularly well written.

The film is also confused about the tone it wants to adopt in certain scenes. For example, when Jackie and Janaki meet a doctor (Ramesh Thilak) who explains her illness in an oddly confusing manner, I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to laugh or feel sympathy. The dialogue is clearly written as comedy, while the background score insists on seriousness.

Sure, the reason behind the tonal dissonance of that scene is revealed later, but it is difficult to invest emotionally when the scene itself isn’t sure how it wants to play.

Still, once the con-games begin, the movie gathers pace. It is hard to ignore that these ‘protagonists’ are exploiting the gullibility of ordinary people and their willingness to help others, but the screenplay goes out of its way to ensure their victims never actually lose money while the scammers profit.

For instance, Saravanan tampers with his office printer using a ball bearing so that official receipts aren’t printed. He then invests the money collected into quick-profit trade deals before paying the customers’ bills before the due date. Mithra and the Janaki-Jackie duo run similar scams of their own (film critic Baradwaj Rangan plays one of Mithra’s ignorant victims).

The fast-paced editing and convenient character placements do their best to stop you from thinking too hard about the logical loopholes. In Saravanan’s case, he is also conveniently (and unknowingly) aided by his dim-witted senior colleague, played by V T V Ganesh.

I won’t deny there are a couple of smart touches here, particularly in the way the separate scams eventually become interconnected and the domino effect that follows when one of them goes wrong.

The Tricks Become Predictable

The second half has the protagonists combining their collective cunning to rescue Jeeva from the clutches of a randomly-written villain with spurious intentions. It is essentially one long heist stitched together through multiple scams.

On paper, the plan may seem ingenious, but what unfolds on screen never delivers the wow factor that a well-made heist thriller usually does.

It is important to understand that audiences walking into these films are smart enough to follow the game. They expect the heroes to pull a rabbit out of the hat. The makers simply have to be smarter than the audience by making sure we don’t see where the hat is hidden before the rabbit appears.

Unfortunately, Saravanan’s master plan, including the way he eventually brings down the antagonist, can be spotted several twists in advance. The manner in which he and his team pull off some of the scams feels far too convenient, such as escaping a traffic checking by talking in Korean gibberish. Or somehow convincing a character, who should have been angry with them, in helping them with their final plan without showing how that convincing happened.

Even the twist involving the kid suffers from the same problem because the film quietly hints at it much earlier through a flashback song.

Sure, the screenplay throws in a few roadblocks to add some tension and they occasionally work more so because of its comic approach. Like the scene where Janaki tries to convince a potential target that there are network issues in a video call so that they can get more time to extend their con.

Even then, these moments aren’t clever enough to leave you impressed by the ingenuity of the escapes.

Performances Work To Some Extent

The performances are fine, though; Arjun Das, Anna Ben, Yogi Babu and Vadivukkarasi make their characters engaging even when the writing fails them.

Con City also thankfully doesn’t overindulge in melodrama to give weight to the characters’ motivations, but whenever it does, it falters. Like the aforementioned flashback song where the characters reminisce about bonding with the child. We have barely seen them function as a believable family, so the whole song sequence feels like an unnecessary drag on the runtime.

Similarly, an emotional scene between Jackie and Janaki, when the former realises his dream has slipped away, feels awkwardly placed, though thankfully it is brief, well-performed and ends on a quirky exchange. The humour works in patches, particularly the comical exchanges between Janaki and Jackie, though even that becomes repetitive after a point.

None of these flaws would have mattered as much if the film had delivered a genuinely thrilling heist plotline. But when your most-wanted characters fool everyone simply by dressing up as old people, without looking remotely unrecognisable, this doesn’t even feel like Con Panchayat, forget Con City.