Dev movie review: A lifeless story of self-discovery and love 

Karthi-starrer Dev, directed by debutant Rajath Ravishankar, is one of those wannabe attempts that you never want to take seriously, despite the film’s effort to appear ambitious.

Promoted as an adventure film, Dev never makes you feel adventurous. It’s also a story about self-discovery, but it does not make you leave everything and pack your bags and go on, say, a hike. Even though the film features Karthi travelling to some really exotic places and even climb Mount Everest for the heck of it, it hardly evokes any kind of emotion, let alone entertain.

Karthi plays Dev, an adventure seeker and he believes in living life to the fullest. He’s someone who takes so much pleasure and excitement in all of life’s thrills; he even drags two of his best friends wherever he goes even when they’re least interested. There’s even a running gag throughout the entire film about how one of Dev’s friends wants a normal life.

When Dev meets Meghna, played by Rakul Preet Singh, it is love at first sight. Rakul too lives life on her own terms. For her own reasons, she doesn’t believe in men and it has to do with her father’s abusive relationship with her mother. Meghna channels all that aggression into building her career and emerging as a successful self-made entrepreneur.

What happens when the lives of these two very different individuals with very different approach to life cross paths? This forms the crux of this romantic drama which is mostly bland and lifeless.

Dev is both a story of self-discovery and love and the disappointing fact is that it is plain boring no matter how you see it. Unlike most stories of self-discovery, Dev never really makes us root for the protagonist.

Karthi gets everything in life so easily as he belongs to a well-off family. Therefore, when he goes on these life-changing exotic trips, one gets the feeling that he’s on a holiday because he’s freaking rich. It’s not like he has family issues that he wants to run away from. He simple chooses to travel because he loves exploring and meeting new people.

After Dev meets Megha and he expresses his love for her, he’s asked to do more with his life than just travelling at one point. This is when he decides to climb Mount Everest and it leaves us wondering why. It’s really hard to understand the point that director Rajath wants to prove.

Good intentions alone don’t really make a film click and there can’t be a better example than Dev, which tries to be ambitious but never really hits the right spots in order to inspire.

Despite the presence of actors like Prakash Raj and Ramya Krishnan, it’s disappointing that the film offers them very little to no scope to perform. Irrespective of his immense talent, it’s becoming unbearable to watch Prakash Raj in father roles as filmmakers don’t want him to get out of Bommarillu (2006) mode. We’d all love to have a friendly relationship with our fathers but it can’t be as sweet as the one between Prakash Raj and Karthi in Dev. It’s too superfluous to be true.

Dev has a lot of good intentions and it is loaded with sugar-coated life lessons, but these elements don’t make it work neither as an adventure film nor as an engaging story of self-discovery and love.