Cobra Movie Review: Cobra begins with two assassinations. The chief minister of Orissa is shot at a public meeting in Coimbatore and the prince of Scotland is killed during his wedding. Aslan (Irfan Pathan), the interpol officer handling the case, comes to know of a thesis by college student Judith Samson (Meenakshi), who claims the two high-profile murders could have been carried out only by a genius mathematician. The only common connection seems to be the fact that both the victims had been critical of a corporate behemoth run by Rishi (Roshan Mathews). Meanwhile, Madhiazhagan (Vikram), the genius mathematician and master of disguise, is already working on his next assignment – killing a Russian minister. But a mysterious hacker warns the cops and hopes to unmask Madhi. Can the mathematician solve this new problem and discover the unknown identity?
Ajay Gnanamuthu’s Cobra is the kind of an overwrought, overlong, over-indulgent, overloud and over-the-top action entertainer that is made in an old-fashioned way, stuffed with scenes that pander to its star’s image, flashbacks that are one too many, romantic tracks that are tepid, with a pair of bland female leads, and songs that seem to have been included only because they have a big-name composer (AR Rahman) on board. There are some impressive moments, of course, but the excesses turnt the film into a tiresome affair after a while.
You can see why this script would have appealed to Vikram. It has the scope for Acting with a capital A (something that he has come to believe in post Anniyan), and gives him to sport different looks (like Kamal Haasan in Dasavatharam), and the actor, who puts up a committed and earnest performance, does have fun playing this role, especially in an Interrogation scene that appears in the second half. To his credit, after a rather shaky start, Ajay Gnanamuthu manages to get us invested in Mathiazhagan, especially from the moment we get to know of his psychological issues. The scenes involving his hallucinations are shot rather well, and even the revelation in the interval is decent enough to keep us invested in the film. But the second half turns out to be a mess, with flashbacks that hardly move us and weakly written cat-and-mouse games.
