After doing a New Year's Eve show, the female radio disc-jockey team Red
Chillies find a dead man in their home - and are stupid enough to follow
their first instinct and make a getaway, guided via satellite telephone
(which cannot be traced) by their mentor, millionair Omar (Mohanlal).
Hours later, cop Stalin (Biju Menon) finds the dead body in their home,
finds a bunch of people run down by a car barely a mile away, and finds
the car of the Red Chillies nearby, covered in blood - which does of
course imply that the Chillies have run all of these people over in sheer
panic. From now on, Stalin is hell-bent to track them down, especially
since among the dead is Stalin's father, a communist leader (hence the
Stalin-name, I suppose), who by the way has spoken out against Omar quite
publicly. Omar guides the Red Chillies in their getaway via phone,
however he seems to have his own agenda, and when the girls - minus Maglin
(Juli), who has apparently drowned in some rapids while on the run - are
finally captured by the authorities, it seems that Omar has led them into
a trap. But once the murder is brought to court, Omar shows another side
of himself, that of a brilliant lawyer who gets the girls acquitted in
what seemed like an opened and shut case. Thing is, Omar knows something
nobody else knows, that Maglin didn't really die but faked her death to
get away from the others. Soon, Omar has tracked her down and forces a
confession out of her - not a confession that she was the culprit but a
confession that she borrowed the Red Chillies' car to someone else before
the whole incident, and soon enough, Omar gets his hands on this someone
else, Franco, who has committed all the murders the girls have been
accused of - and Omar manages to make him confess before he delivers him
to Stalin. But Omar knows something else: That the brains behind Stalin's
father's murder was none other than Stalin himself, who only needed Franco
to put the blame on the Red Chillies. And after fighting it out with
Stalin, Omar hands him over to the authorities. Reading my
synopsis, this film might sound way more exciting than it is. Actually, Red
Chillies is a rather dull affair that is kept alive mainly by
Mohanlal's flawless performance and a few nice plottwists at the end, but
is sunk by all those flashy techniques to suggest a fast pace like
rapid-fire editing (even in scenes in which noching happens), deliberate
slow motion, freeze frames or sped up sequences at the most inappropriate
moments, split screens when they make no sense, or computer-enhanced
editing effects when they make no sense. These tactics are used in such an
overkill-manner that one can't help but notice there's nothing going on
onscreen to back them up, that the story is actually pretty boring and
slow-moving, which is only emphasized by all this technical,
non-narrative mumbo-jumbo. Apart from that, the titular team of female
DJs, all beautiful girls to be sure, seem to be at best supporting
characters in their own movie. In all, not a total loss thanks to
Mohanlal alone, but nothing really worth your time either.
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