Test (now on Netflix) is an Indian drama centering on cricket, a sport that, to us stoopide Americains, is the equivalent of Mission: Impossible movies – you may not be able to follow it, but it’s pretty fun to watch people run around for a couple hours. Specifically, the plot hinges on a “test match,” an epic five-day tournament of sorts, between India and Pakistan, and stars Siddharth as a star player in a deep slump, Nayanthara as his kid’s teacher and R Madhavan as her troubled husband. First-time director S. Sashikanth oversees quite a sprawling conglomeration of dramatic events, tangling domestic drama and a kidnapping plot with high-stakes sports action over the course of nearly two-and-a-half hours, leaving us feeling like it should be shorter or should be longer but definitely shouldn’t be two-and-a-half hours.
TEST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Arjun (Siddharth) is at a crossroads. He’s a cricket star and one of the anchors of the Indian national team, but he’s being pressured to retire after a disheartening two-year performance decline. India is three days away from hosting a historic test match against Pakistan, and the stress is getting to him. His life is cricket. It’s all he knows. He mopes and pouts and denies and projects and, frankly, is an ass to his wife (Meera Jasmine) and their 10-year-old son Adi (Lirish Rahav). The boy wants to be a cricket champ like his dad. Arjun watches the youngster struggle during a match, then tells the kid afterward, “Your team lost because of you.” And that makes Arjun the posterboy for the old adage about how you need a license to go fishing but any idiot can be a parent.
Adi’s schoolteacher is Kumudha (Nayanthara), who’s known Arjun for many years, dating back to when her father was his cricket coach. She’s married to Saravanan (Madhavan), who, like Arjun, is driven to be great. Difference is, he’s not there yet. Far from it. He’s a gifted MIT grad who ended up running a canteen, although Kumudha doesn’t know he sold it, and went into depth to loan sharks, to fund his dream project, a groundbreaking fuel cell that can power a car with water – big if true! Huge, actually. World-changing. Sara wants to be the next Steve Jobs. Kumudha would be fine if he was just a husband and father, though – and the latter is an issue. They’ve struggled to conceive, and are undergoing expensive fertility treatments. Her dream is to be a mother, and perhaps that’s why she dotes on her students, with a special affinity for Adi.
Test takes approximately three weeks of its two-and-a-half-hour run time to establish this scenario, bouncing between Arjun and Kumudha’s tentatively linked life sagas. They eventually draw closer when we learn that Sara’s scummy loan shark is part of a betting ring that’s trying to fix the India-Pakistan test match. Kumudha’s connection to the star player opens the door for Sara to flip a switch inside his brain and go from fairly lovable slobbo who makes bad decisions due to his desperate desire to change the world, to a guy who flushes his morals down the sewer for the sake of personal gain and glory. Whether we buy that shift in personality is the question.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Test is a rickety mashup of sports-star-going-for-one-last-victory-lap drama For Love of the Game, the infertility subplot in This is Us, and the kidnapping plot of Ransom.
Performance Worth Watching: Nayanthara is the standout here, the person giving us an emotional handhold between Siddharth’s sour performance and Madhavan’s campy turn.
Memorable Dialogue: Arjun stands at a crossroads within the crossroads he’s already standing at: “Should I choose the son I brought to life, or cricket, which is my life?”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Test is what happens when plot dictates character, and when directors are so enamored with their own work they can’t stand to make difficult decisions in the editing room. It feels like two movies roughly stapled together – the first half is an engaging and relatable story about personal and familial struggle, and the second is a flabby thriller that thinks it’s more suspenseful than it is. The tenor of the drama shifts in a manner sudden enough that it must have severed the characters’ brain stems, because they begin operating without the logic necessary to improve their situations, thus rendering the film more “interesting.” Which is a way of saying it’s phony and contrived and increasingly unconvincing.
The screenplay, by Sashikanth and Suman Kumar, isn’t bereft of good ideas: The Arjun character finds himself pinned between the well-being of himself and his family, and a sort of national duty as the cricket team’s star player, all under potential public scrutiny. Sara works for the greater good, but stumbles when he conflates his project with personal success. And Nayanthara finds poignancy despite the screenplay’s rote handling of the story of a woman’s desire to raise her own child. (Is it a coincidence that the men find themselves in conflicts with significant societal implications, while Kumudha’s scenario barely reaches past the walls of her own home? Probably not.)
So Test doesn’t lack dramatic potential. But its tonal blend is like lumpy mashed potatoes. It leans on sports-movie cliches (it all comes down to the last pitch while play-by-play announcers breathlessly narrate). It deploys cheesy, drawn out montages and slo-mo scenes that needlessly pad the run time – in drastic contrast to some sequences that make us go cross-eyed with a series of confounding rapid-fire edits. And after a while, it segues from acceptable melodrama to cornball soap opera. There’s a way to integrate this collection of interests, ideas and conflicts, but it requires more dedicated time in the writing and editing rooms.
Our Call: Test is a potentially engaging drama that suffers in execution. And it’s about 45 minutes too long. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
