Of the movies I've seen recently, I've probably liked Doctor the best (and this is amongst movies like Love Story, Thalaash, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, Bhramam, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, etc.). The story itself sounds a little bit absurd, but it plays out very nicely as you go. The idea of a hero saving someone from some kind of kidnapping or trafficking alongside a love story has been employed in many movies--Google it up and you should find at least 5 movies. The thing is, these movies tend to lead to lengthy monologues at the end that put the hero on an even higher pedestal than he was already on. (Think recent Mahesh Babu movies).
Doctor cleverly attempts to go around that and mostly succeeds in keeping the hero grounded and imperfect. Every now and then, we find those natural flaws in Dr. Varun (an army doctor played by Sivakarthikeyan). He's not always likable (he’s sometimes stubborn, strict, etc.) but that's what adds to his otherwise flat, emotionally-distant character.
At the beginning of the movie, I found his character to be a bit awkward. He gave a mini-monologue to his superior about how it would be better to save a terrorist who has a chance of surviving rather than treating someone who would die anyway. It felt like he was a robot when he was saying that dialogue, the way he moved his head to look from his superior to the patient, and then back to the superior. Usually, it's the beginning that helps the audience define the main character in their minds, but this confused me until the plot progressed into the actual story. It seemed like very poor acting until I understood (like 10ish minutes in) that that was his character. That, all of a sudden, changed things. His acting shifted from oddly mediocre to actually really good in my mind, and probably one of his best in my opinion.
What I really liked about the movie was the themes. I've mentioned this before more than enough times, but I hate it when heroes give a long lecture about good deeds and life choices to villains after doing their 'good deed' of proving the villain wrong. What usually should entail "Save the innocent!" becomes "Who cares about the innocent? Let's prove the villains wrong, lecture them, and earn a good name with the innocent!" (*cough cough* MAHESH BABU *cough cough*).
I couldn't possibly hate that more. It's in almost every stupid masala movie. (I'm glad that that's changing these days. I've hated those movies all my life and basically explains why I didn't like movies growing up.) IT LITERALLY DOES NOT SOUND HARD TO EXPLAIN YOUR STORY'S MORAL OR THEME IN A WELL-SPREAD WAY THROUGHOUT THE MOVIE RATHER THAN IN A CHUNK AT THE END.
But anyway, back to my point. Doctor didn't do any of that. There weren't any lectures or textbook dialogues, no unnecessary inspirational segments, no useless dialogue that force-fit a theme into the movie. From the start, there was a running theme of karma. When Prathap (Yogi Babu) is introduced into the story, he says that "Karma is a boomerang" when the police try to find the kidnapper. Just one simple, necessary line. Again, near the end of the climax scene, Varun says, "It must be the outcome of my good deeds," when the military enters to give him some unrequested support. Not once does he seek to prove the villain’s behavior wrong--that's something common sense tells you. He instead proves his own actions as beneficial specifically to the villain. Never once does he look for approval of his actions from Mini (Priyanka Arul Mohan), his ex-fiancee. He does what he thinks is right, even if it's occasionally not the best thing to do. SK even gets relatively less screen time and dialogues than a typical hero in a movie. It's not an utterly disproportionate amount, but it is noticeable that each main character got a nearly-equal amount of screen time and dialogue, and that it wasn't skewed in the hero’s favor.
What started out as me trying to explain why I liked the themes became a character appreciation write-up, but I'm not disappointed with that.
So continuing onwards, there was one thing I kept noticing: the mention of doctors saving lives. Varun quite literally saves lives in the movie rather than simply saving lives medically. (I guess that might've been where the idea of the movie could've originated). He was kinda like a flawed god. There were even mentions of Christianity throughout. (There's a scene where Yogi Babu is almost crucified and another where the group ends up wearing Santa masks. Even the symbol for medical corps, which is cross-shaped, is in the title graphic.)
All of this beautiful stuff was told through dark humor (which I love so so soooooooo much). Dark humor is by far my favorite kind of humor because it's almost always situational comedy and it's rarely force-fit. (It lightens a situation so much and somehow elevates it to another level of greatness. It's stress-relievingly hilarious.) I laughed so much during this movie, I can't express it in words. I did not expect to laugh this much, but it all just fit together so well, I couldn’t hold back the laughter
Probably the only thing I didn't like as much was the ending, or how Mini just suddenly changed to like Varun when he didn't change too much throughout the movie (besides showing a minimally increased amount of emotion). I mean, it does make more sense than her falling in love after a singular fight. (She fell in love with him after nearly two hours of a movie, and not a three-minute fight, so that was definitely something). I would’ve loved to see her appreciate him more rather than suddenly fall in love with his actions, but I can overlook this small thing considering I loved the rest of the movie a lot. I loved the style (forgot to mention it earlier whoops), the acting, the story, the comedy and basically everything so much that one small thing probably won’t stop me from watching Doctor again.
Picture credits (for all the pictures): YouTube/Sun TV
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