It’s quite easy to describe I’m Game, Nahas Hidhayath’s follow up to his wildly entertaining debut, RDX (2023). Imagine if SP Muthuraman’s Enakkul Oruvan (1984) and Madonne Ashwin’s Maaveeran (2023) had a baby. The older film is a kooky reincarnation saga played with melodramatic earnestness while the latter maintains an irony-tipped sharpness through its serious action-oriented storytelling. I’m Game doesn’t always get the ratio of this mix right, but it hedges its bets on the handful of inventive ideas that keeps the proceedings engaging.
Written by Sajeer Baba, Ismail Aboobacker and Bilal Moidu, I’m Game doesn’t hit the ground running. It is almost soporific at the start, scenes don’t flow, they are barely functional as we meet Dulquer Salmaan’s Dan, a loser prodigal son in debt and gambling his father’s money away while appearing shocked every time someone calls him—you guessed it—loser. These portions have terrible exterior shots with probably green screens, and shoddy recreation of cricket action with an Indian Premier League clone called CPL (for copyright reasons surely).
Two accidents bookend these initial portions, the first one ends with death, we don’t know the victim. Dan suffers the second one and loses his hand in the process. I’m Game quite literally goes out on a limb from here, transplanting the dead man’s hand into Dan’s shoulders. It is as crazy as it sounds, and Nahas and Dulquer manage to sell these portions with Dan’s newfound zest for life, though the identity of the hand donor still a pall over his life.
Initially everything is sober, a distraught and depressed Dan takes to physiotherapy as smoothly as he does to the physician Dr Isha (Kayadu Lohar). They even celebrate his return home with a fully mobile new limb. But soon the phantom hand takes over. I’m Game is fun when Dan is incredulous at its impulsive actions, moving about as if with a mind of its own, the hand as its own person. Dan tries everything, he keeps it in his pocket, cuffs it, retrains it to no avail. He even talks to the hand. At his wits end the hand meets its match, rather its villain. Mysskin’s David, a businessman secretly operating a betting mafia, appears as the hand’s nemesis and the hand drags Dan along with it for its revenge.
If Maaveeran had an outer voice giving strength and instructions to the hero, the hand here serves as Dan’s unintended weapon. Bound by duty, the hand remembers and wants revenge for its original owner. For a while there, Nahas’s inventive machinations with Dan’s uncomfortably hilarious situation brings the house down. A bar fight where Dan finally realizes the power of the hand is a particular delight. But its thirst for revenge is so nefarious that it doesn’t think twice before attacking Dan, its carrier. These are some of the cleverer portions of I’m Game, Nahas giving body horror a whole another definition. And Mysskin to his credit, like in Maaveeran, plays David with just enough cartoonish flair.
There is something about a film seemingly about gambling turning into one about playing the hand you are dealt with. Not everything Nahas throws lands. Just like he did with RDX, Nahas extends a neat idea way beyond its elasticity. The action sequences and flashbacks grow tiring, and this rudimentary world of cricket, gambling and match-fixing is easy to understand and therefore predict. With about three to four solid ideas up its sleeve, I’m Game is still entertaining despite its penchant to… overplay its hand.
‘I'm Game’ is in theatres.
Aditya Shrikrishna is a Chennai-based critic.