I'm Game

Nahas Hidhayath, both writer and director of I’m Game, does something clever by setting his second film in Hyderabad. When looked at purely as a business proposition, it makes sense given the stardom Dulquer Salmaan enjoys in the two Telugu-speaking states. From a narrative lens, the Hyderabad setting complements the film’s larger-than-life aspirations and the audacity with which it navigates a particularly improbable plotline. But instead of settling for this alien setting alone, it adds Tamil characters to its core. The film doesn’t even make a big deal of this, choosing instead to play this lack of specificity as something very natural to the film’s urban setting. What these choices do is prepare us for a film that feels like it was not made in Malayalam. But there are advantages to this too. Instead of looking for realism or the crutch of logic to enter its crazy world, we’re already there about 10 minutes into the film. This creates a distance, as though this story is happening somewhere else, but it also sets the stage for the film to take a wild swing at almost anything, as long as it entertains.

I’m Game is essentially the story of two men. On one hand (pun intended), we have Dan John (Dulquer Salmaan), a compulsive gambler, and on the other, Vicky (Antony Varghese Pepe), a passionate cricketer. It so happens that their lives get ‘accidentally’ intertwined by a sheer twist of fate, leading to plenty of confusion, drama, realisation and eventually, resolution. Nahas Hidhayath’s story may not be entirely fresh, with many films in the past, including in Malayalam, exploring similar territories, but the material is still pulpy enough for a commercial potboiler. If you think of it, the director’s debut, RDX, a smashing hit, also had a generic storyline, but the execution was right on the money for an action-heavy entertainer. With I’m Game, the young filmmaker aims really big. Bigger stars, better production values, broader themes, but the ambitious vision is spoilt by some mediocre writing and shoddy execution, resulting in a mishmash of a genre hybrid film that’s stuck somewhere between a promising body-horror thriller and a template revenge drama.

Raghava Lawrence cracked a great template for making an easy, mindless entertainer by blending horror and comedy with a revenge drama. The story goes something like this: a scared hero meets a gory ghost. The gory ghost possesses the scared hero for a secret mission. The hero rebels. Then the ghost tells a sad backstory. The sympathetic hero relents. The ghost gets its revenge. Now, replace the ghost with a transplanted hand, and that is pretty much what I’m Game is. Dulquer Salmaan plays Dan John, a rich businessman with a gambling problem. He is a spoilt brat who wants to make a point to his father, mother and the world in general, but only ends up losing money in cricket league betting. While escaping gangster moneylenders, he meets with an accident, loses his hand and gets it transplanted from an anonymous donor. Once his transplanted hand starts to function, it starts operating on its own.

It’s quite easy to describe I’m Game, Nahas Hidhayath’s follow up to his wildly entertaining debut, RDX (2023). Imagine if SP Muthuraman’s Enakkul Oruvan (1984) and Madonne Ashwin’s Maaveeran (2023) had a baby. The older film is a kooky reincarnation saga played with melodramatic earnestness while the latter maintains an irony-tipped sharpness through its serious action-oriented storytelling. I’m Game doesn’t always get the ratio of this mix right, but it hedges its bets on the handful of inventive ideas that keeps the proceedings engaging.