Chennai: Gorilla, directed by Don Sandy, stars Jiiva and Arjun Reddy fame Shalini Pandey in the lead role along with a truckload of comedians – Sathish, Vivek Prasanna, Yogi Babu, Motta Rajendran and Lollu Sabha Swaminathan. The cast also includes a chimpanzee, named Kong that made one interested to watch the film.
The film opens up with three friends (Jiiva, Vivek Prasanna and Sathish) in a forest and a wild cry from an animal leads them to a laboratory where they see a chimpanzee die after an unsuccessful test done on it by doctors for a research. They find a baby chimpanzee and brings it with them in order to save it. Jiiva decides to keep it with himself at his house.
The plot however is not about the chimpanzee but about the three friends who are in need of money. Jiiva is a conman, who is a pickpocket in the morning, works in a medical shop (stealing medicines) in the afternoon and is a fake doctor by evening. Sathish is the sole breadwinner of his family and lost his job due to recession and Vivek Prasanna is an aspiring actor. They at a local bar soon plans in an inebriated condition to settle big in life and hearing that a farmer joins them and they hatch a plan to rob a bank.
They watch Hollywood heist films and gets ready to rob a bank. They get fake guns and bomb, wear a pardha and gorilla mask and along with the chimpanzee enter a bank. When they manage to get all the money in the bank in their kitty, the chimpanzee turns out to be a trouble maker as it presses the red button that alerts the police and the bank is surrounded by them.
How the gang manages to escape forms the rest of the story. There are several logical loopholes in the story which the director tries hard to cover in the name of comedy. In one scene, at gunpoint, Jiiva walks out of the bank reveling his identity and challenges the cops. The inspector (Radha Ravi) too talks to him politely without trying to shoot him despite ten guns pointing at him. Inside the bank to there are several comedy scenes with Yogi Babu, Sathish and Vivek Prasanna trying hard to evoke laughter but fail in their mission.
There are also funny references to Tamilnadu politicians. What started out as a bank heist, suddenly in the second half, turns out to be a preachy one that takes up the issue of waiving farmers loan. There are also references to the Jallikattu protest. Jiiva then suddenly becomes someone hailed as the ‘next Chief Minister.’
Jiiva on his part has acted well but for an actor whose last hit film was Ko, this film once again joins the list of his unsuccessful venture. Shalini Pandey, making her Tamil debut has nothing to do in the film and once again is depicted as a girl who falls in love after being stalked. Sam CS’s song and background music adds value to the film. Had the director focused more on the logic in the film instead of meaningless comedy scenes, the film would have fared much better.