‘Triples’ review: A lively series with the flavour of the Crazy Mohan-Kamal Haasan universe

The Crazy Mohan connection to ‘Triples’, which is playing on Disney + Hotstar VIP, is unmissable. The lead character is named Ram and there’s a girl called Mythili in the scheme of things. No, we weren’t thinking about ‘Panchathanthiram’.

Much later, the lead pair stealthily wanders around with a newspaper covering their faces. No, we weren’t thinking about ‘Michael Madana Kama Rajan’ at all.

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The hero opens a coffee shop called ‘Kalakita da kaapi’. Oh no, we weren’t thinking about ‘Vasoolraja MBBS’ at all.

Comedy of errors, mistaken identities and irreverent wordplay… everything that we loved about the Crazy Mohan-Kamal Haasan film universe is present in adequate measure in ‘Triples’.

Getting ready to be married for a second time, Ram (Jai) has second thoughts. While his best friends Maadhu (Vivek Prasanna) and Cheenu (Rajkumar) try to cheer him up, things take a wild turn when someone unexpectedly enters his life. Everything gets chaotic after that, and the eight episodes are a decent mix of romance, adventure and most importantly, humour.

Writer Balaji Jayaraman and director Charukesh Sekar deserve credit for conjuring up quite a few funny situations, and the actors revel in them. Jai is a bit too sober, but his on-screen friends more than make up for it. The instruction to Vivek Prasanna seems to have been simple: mimic Yugi Sethu from ‘Panchathanthiram’. The disadvantage to that is that his dialogues are too fast to grasp. A joke or two is bound to go unnoticed.

But the ones that work hit home hard. A conversation about IPL between two cricket fans got me laughing hard, while a tense moment with a doctor results in lighter moments. Another tense moment with a politician wanting to go to the cops results in laughter due to some clever wordplay. ‘Triples’ rarely takes itself too seriously, and that’s a mighty strength.

What isn’t a strength, though, is the constant back and forth between the present timeline. The line — a few years ago… — indicating a flashback of sorts appears almost like a running subtitle in the first few episodes!

However, it helps that the characters are mostly well developed. Meera (Vani Bhojan) and Mythili (Madhuri MJ, who looks like Samantha in a few frames) have scope for performances, something of a rarity in Tamil comedies. Namita Krishnamurthy as Janaki is someone to watch out for; her expressions match the humour-cum-tension on screen and her cute-comedy camaraderie with Gopi Prasanna clicks.

‘Triples’ arrives at a time when there’s a lot of comedy options for the average Tamil viewer. There are Vadivelu/Vivek scenes galore to re-visit, and other recent aspiring players who are creating quite a mark in the online space. That it manages to leave a mark despite all that means something, and that surely augurs well for the larger Tamil comic space.

‘Triples’ is currently streaming on Disney + Hotstar VIP