Custody review: Naga Chaitanya’s thriller is all action, let down by weak writing

Naga Chaitanya as Siva in Custody. Chaitanya’s rakish charm rescues him from the weak writing to a certain extent. (Image source: Screen grab/Custody trailer)

Venkat Prabhu’s Telugu-Tamil thriller Custody begins with a disaster in the year 1996 – an explosion on the road that takes many lives. Fast forward to two years later, and constable Siva (Naga Chaitanya) is leading a fairly uneventful life with minor bumps – his girlfriend Revathy (Krithi Shetty) wants to get married and his superior officer dislikes him for his proactiveness and caste location. But everything turns upside down on a fateful night when his love life intersects with his professional duty.

Ahead of the film’s release, Prabhu revealed that he’d been inspired by the Malayalam film Nayattu (2021) to write Custody. Like Nayattu, Custody too is about a policeman who is hunted by his own due to political reasons and must fend for himself. But the treatment of this premise is wholly different in Custody. While the Malayalam film underlined the helplessness of individuals within a corrupt system, Prabhu’s interpretation leans towards a conventional narrative that has an infallible hero at its centre.

Siva’s mission is to produce Raju (Arvind Swami), a dreaded criminal, at a court in Bengaluru. Arvind Swami, who was once the chocolate boy hero of Tamil cinema, has had a remarkable second innings as the antagonist ever since he played Siddharth Abhimanyu in Thani Oruvan (2015). Prabhu gives him plenty of opportunities to display his swag and Swami doesn’t hold back. The role, though, is underwritten and we never really get why Raju does all he does – or why he insists on calling himself Rasu instead of Raju.

Arvind Swami as Raju in Custody, which released in theatres on May 12, 2023. (Screen grab/Junglee Music Telugu)

In fact, Custody has several familiar faces in pivotal roles, including Sarathkumar, Priyamani, Ramki, Sampath Raj, YG Mahendran, Jiiva and Anandhi, but the writing is too predictable to really make use of the talent on board. For instance, the flashback defines Siva’s course of action. The generic, unimaginative track, however, doesn’t create the kind of emotional impact that it should have. This is also because Siva only seems to remember his past at the same time that the audience is discovering it – some foreshadowing would have definitely helped.

Naga Chaitanya’s rakish charm rescues him from the weak writing to a certain extent, making us look past the songs that seem stuffed into the screenplay and the romance that becomes an annoying distraction. To be fair, Krithi Shetty has more to do in the film than just play the “love interest” but her inclusion appears forced and makes little sense, given the context of the mission. When the couple has a lovers’ tiff in the middle of a life-threatening situation and Shetty walks off in a huff, you have to question if this is the same director who gave us the tightly-knit Maanaadu (2021), a time loop thriller that ran on repetitive sequences but never got boring for a moment.

Custody comes alive in the action sequences – the one shot in the dam is especially arresting and Yuvan’s background score adds some much-needed excitement to the proceedings. The film’s biggest problem, though, is its tonal inconsistency. You never once feel Siva’s frustration because he’s constantly dodging bullets and knives thrown at him. He’s presented as a supercop though he’s a pretty ordinary lower-rung policeman who enters the force due to circumstances. The plot, therefore, isn’t suspenseful because Siva’s victory is predestined.

The twists, too, defy logic – for example, a senior cop puts a gun to the head of an innocent man in a crowded, public place to draw out a fugitive and there are no consequences when the man dies. The law enforcement officers seem to be operating in a banana republic because all of them blatantly flout the law, without bothering to even attempt a cover-up. If this is the case, killing their target should have been child’s play instead of the lengthy process that the film makes us sit through. The episode that triggers this whole saga is bizarre and unconvincing – and you end up wondering why anyone would take such a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to hide a murder, especially in this film’s cinematic universe where anything goes.

Vennela Kishore and Goparaju Ramana provide some comic relief in the midst of relentless action scenes. There are quite a few Tamil popular culture references which may not work so well with the Telugu audience. For instance, Siva talks about Mani Ratnam’s Tamil romantic drama Mouna Raagam (1986) to Revathy when it would have been more natural for him to refer to a Telugu film. Bilingual films that attempt to cater to different sets of audiences often end up disappointing both, and Custody too runs this risk of alienating its viewers.

Venkat Prabhu’s ability to mix fun and wacky comedy with exciting action is what makes his filmography unique. Given such a track record, Custody feels like Prabhu’s usually reliable imagination bailed on him.