‘Friendship’ movie review: Harbhajan Singh turns Tamil film hero in a dreary watch

If you’ve been following former cricketer Harbhajan Singh on social media, you’ll know about his love for all things Tamil. He has been tweeting constantly in Tamil, a language he seems to love dearly.

And now, he has become a Tamil film hero, in college campus tale Friendship. He plays a mechanical engineering student and an integral part of the all-boys gang there. Enter Anitha (Losliya), who keeps giggling and smiling all through her classes.

The boys get excited about the sole female presence in the classroom, but thankfully, there’s no romance. But there’s oodles of friendship, as the title suggests, and the entire first half is nothing but a collection of sequences that probably was written in a single piece of paper: college students walk, college students chat, college students laugh.

Just when we thought that there would be more campus drama, Friendship turns into a different beast. A powerful politician walks in. A court case begins. How will all this end?

This genre-hopping might be novel to Harbhajan, but for us unsuspecting Tamil film viewers, Friendship is a dreary watch that has little focus on any of its material. The only clever aspect about the sequences, directed by John Paul Raj and Sham Surya, is that they mostly place Harbhajan among a group of friends and do not get him to talk often (the lip sync is terribly off). Even a cricket match, placed randomly when something else is going on, is poorly executed; it comes off looking like a computer game. Harbhajan’s debut in Tamil cinema is far from that soaring-in-the-crowds sixer or a magnificent fifer that the ace spinner would have been hoping for.

Friendship is currently running in theatres