DSP Review | A Trashy Mass Masala Film That Takes the Audience for Granted

The first and second half of Ponram’s Vijay Sethupathi starrer DSP is so disjoint that you can look at them as two different films – correction – two different crap films with zero elements of excitement. The writing of this movie goes after anything and everything to stretch the movie’s duration, resulting in a pathetic mass film that laughs at its audience for wasting their time and money.

Vasco da Gama, who belongs to Dindigul, is our hero. His father is a flower merchant, and his father wants him to get a government job. During the course of his hunt for a job and several other things, Vasco’s equation with local goon Mutta Ravi becomes clumsy, forcing him to leave Dindigul. The return of our hero to his home turf as a police officer and how the clash proceeds are what we see in DSP.

Ponram is not someone who is known for nuanced storytelling, and all his movies have been these loud crowd-pullers. But in DSP, he doesn’t even care about having a structure or a story to the film. I think editor Vivek Harshan might have had a tough job selecting sequences that were relevant to the story, as almost every scene has this inconsequential feel. We have the typical hero introduction scene that doesn’t serve much to the plot. It is followed by a hasty flashback story. And there you have the typical out-of-the-blue intro song, where the hero tells the elderly to stop advising the younger generation. Then we have a small introduction about the bad guy. The next chapter is, you guessed it right, the heroine’s introduction. No points for guessing her character type.

It is these lazy ways of filmmaking that take the audience for granted and labels them as a bunch of idiots who will be okay with some random crap in slow-motion that makes you hate creations like DSP. The project is backed by Karthick Subbaraj’s Stone Bench Productions. I must say that both Vijay Sethupathi and Karthik Subbaraj are ruining the minimum guarantee associated with them by doing films like these. I know why such a B and C-center-oriented movie is essential for a mainstream star in the Tamil industry, but at least choose a movie with a narratable story rather than something that looks like a mashup of bizarre and insignificant scenes.

Vijay Sethupathi as the central protagonist, Vasco da Gama (there is no reason for that name, btw), is okay in terms of being graceful. But there is an evident lack of interest in his performance as he sleepwalks through this poorly-written character. Anukreethy Vas, with her terrible performance, did justice to Ponram’s shoddy writing of her character. Prabhakar, as Mutta Ravi, uses his usual set of expressions to be that typical villain. The star cast of the movie is really elaborate, and I think somewhere, the desperation to give the footage to all of them extended the movie’s duration.

DSP is nothing short of torture. Even if you are a fan of the Ponram, Muthaiah, and Pandiraj style of hero-worshipping rural family dramas, it will be tough for you to sit through this banal movie. Cliched storytelling is understandable for a formulaic commercial entertainer. But this kind of absolute cluelessness on what to present as a story on such a scale is unforgivable.