Danny is what you might get when you have vague notions of what a murder mystery is but no clue of scriptwriting. The film is a masterclass in bad writing. Things happen in this film just because the director wills them to happen. There is no organic development of the scenes. Take the scene in which Kunthavai (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar), a newly promoted cop, is being thanked by the mother of a man who has been arrested on charges of murdered his young wife. The scene happens in Kunthavai’s house, in the day, and the camera pans inside to show us her sister Mathi proudly smiling. And the very next moment, we see the two sisters somewhere outside, at night, and a duo on a bike attacking them. This hop-skip-jump approach to scenes is not just disorienting (purely unintended, though), but also lays bare the paucity of imagination.
What we get in Danny are plot points instead of storytelling. Scene 1: Introduce the dog. Scene 2: Introduce the dog handler. Scene 3: The crime. Scene 4: Kill he dog handler. Scene 5: Introduce the protagonist. Scene 6: Make protagonist investigate the murder. Scene 7: Clue No 1. So on and so forth. While this approach might seem decent enough, what goes missing is how the scenes play out, and how smoothly they flow into one another. The same approach goes for the characters — cop who believes in justice rather than upholding the law; an innocent sister who has to die so that the investigation feels personal; a dog who is a sidekick; an antagonist who is a druggie; comedians who pop up trying (vainly) to make us laugh… We hardly care about any of these characters, even more so because none of them is developed beyond what their one-line description sounds like.
The director seems to have left it to his lead actress to make this simplistic writing work. But Varalaxmi, who looks the part, cannot do much because her character isn’t fleshed out well. Moreover, the filmmaking is equally basic. We get re-enactments of the murders just so the director can wring some sympathy out of us. But the problem is that even by the 15th minute, the viewer is already busy trying to solve a mystery of their own — the mystery of the lost interest? And they do not even have a dog to sniff it out!
