Naai Sekar Movie Review : A simplistic high-concept comedy that could have been more inventive

Naai Sekar Movie Synopsis: A man bitten by a dog that is being experimented upon by a scientist starts behaving like a dog!
Naai Sekar Movie Review: Kishore Rajkumar’s Naai Sekar has a great premise for a fun film, especially a kids-centric one. The brilliance of this idea is its simplicity – what if a man bitten by a dog starts behaving like one, while the begins to show human qualities?
The protagonist here is Sekar (Sathish), an IT employee, who is in love with his colleague Pooja (Pavithra Lakshmi, a confident debut). A person who hates dogs, Sekar accidentally gets bitten by Padayappa (with the voice of Shiva, who brings his wry humour), a Labrador that is being experimented upon by Rajarajan, a scientist. Man begins to display the animal’s traits while the dog starts to behave like a man. At a time when there is an appraisal underway at work, and a meeting with Pooja’s father in the offing, can Sekar set things right before it is too late?
With a premise ripe with promise for a fun adventure, Kishore Rajkumar doesn’t have to try too hard to make a decent entertainer out of Naai Sekar. And in Sathish, he gets the right actor for this role. We know the actor as a comedian, so some of the antics that he has to do after being bitten by the dog (like biting a character below his hip) doesn’t feel like image-damaging stuff. At the same time, he is also acceptable as a regular guy with a romantic interest. The actor, in his part, gets the mannerisms right, be it hanging his tongue out or showing puppy eyes. The characters also seem quirky – a comic villain (Ganesh of Shankar-Ganesh duo – a casting seems funnier as an idea and less so on screen) who sings a lot, a scientist (George Maryan) who sports T-shirts that have wacky descriptions like Ezhaikalin Einstein Naan, Chinna Stephen Hawking, and Almost-u Aristotle, and a scaredy cat cop who is a fan of the yesteryear actor Krodham Prem. There are even a couple of visual gags, like animals named after Rajini film titles and a Korean restaurant named Bong Joon Hoo Restaurant! The pop cultural references, from the background scores to clips of yesteryear films, are also spot on.
But the problem with Naai Sekar is that it is content to be a time pass comedy when it could have been something truly, outrageously funny. Kishore Rajkumar seems to have gone about writing the script with a checklist of things he should include in a dog-related movie – the ability to sniff, the liking for biscuits, the urge to urinate on a lamppost and so on. And the scenes that take place in the IT office are pedestrian and clichéd. How many times do we have to see Manobala and Lollu Sabha Swaminathan playing managers? And the wackiness of the villain and his henchmen should have resulted in funnier moments, which is not the case here. The film settles for low-brow humour when it could have done a lot more.
There is also the feeling that the writing deserved a couple more rewrites. For example, the arc involving two small-time dog thieves who sell them to a restaurant that makes dog meat, which isn’t sketched well. In its present form, Naai Sekar is likely to appeal more to kids, especially those under-10. For the rest, this is a film that will feel funny in parts and juvenile in the rest.