'CSI Sanatan' hit the cinemas today (March 10). The film is produced by Ajay Srinivas. Let's find out if the movie is worth a watch!
Story
Vikram Chakravarthy (Tarak Ponnappa), the CEO of a chit fund company, is found dead after a night party. Sanathan (Adi Sai Kumar), a clues department sleuth, is handed over the case. He investigates the crime scene and starts grilling prime suspects. Among them is Divya (Nandini Roy), a co-founder of the company and Vikram's business partner for 12 years.
Suspects also include Lasya (Bigg Boss Telugu fame Vasanti), Sudeeksha (Misha Narang), and a Minister named Rajavardhan (Madhusudan Rao). The rest of the film is about how Sanatan navigates the case and narrows down the list of suspects. Is there more to the murdered person's life than meets the eye?
Post-Mortem
A chit fund company has been giving interest-free loans for years. It mobilizes small savings from the poor and middle-class by promising unrealistic returns. What does it take for anyone to call it a Ponzi scheme? A brain and a TV channel? Not even that. A pea-sized brain and a Twitter account. It's that easy. In 'CSI Sanatan', though, the investigators take forever to figure out that the chit fund company has been running a Ponzi scheme. A social media user would have called it one within 15 minutes of its CEO's murder. Perhaps, the director of this movie wrote the story after coming across the term "Ponzi scam" for the first time ever in a vernacular magazine named Nera Prapancham. The rest of the world has known it for ages.
This film calls itself an investigative thriller but its dialogues and the clues-finding endeavours found in the film are elementary. "When there is a murder, there is a murderer," declares our supposedly sharp-minded hero. "If there is a school bus, there is a school" is a quote he could have uttered with panache and be proud of. He is supposedly super-intelligent but he needs a cop to say basic things like this: "We need strong evidence or eye witness." Okay!
We are told the hero has studied Criminology and specializes in locating clues where even the most well-trained cops fail to. But he is never shown displaying his so-called exceptional abilities. All that he does is grill the suspects endlessly, question them ab initio, and press into action an ethical hacker who has the mind-blowing calibre to hack into the systems of everyone and their aunts. How come he doesn't hack into the system of the most dangerous suspect is puzzling, though.
Misha Narang plays Sanatan's ex-lover who re-enters the screen for the sole purpose of a song in the park. The criminals show zero intelligence or sophistication despite thousands of crores being at stake. All the while, our hero tom-toms about his abilities and alleged wisdom. 'How To Prevent Crimes' is a book he is authoring.
Some of Aadi Saikumar's flops such as 'Tees Maar Khan' at least had respectable production values. In 'CSI Sanatan', the fights are primitive, the sets are archaic, and the production design is simply non-existent.
Closing Remarks
'CSI Sanatan' leaves you scratching your brain. It is dumb and is dead on arrival.
