D-16, one of the finest crime thrillers in Kollywood recently?

There's been very few well made genre defining crime thrillers in Kollywood recently. Some examples other than D-16 are Por Thozhil and Ratsasan, which is why Ratsasan caused such a buzz in the weeks following its release. This made me want to rewatch D-16 again recently, and I had to note down my thoughts fresh somewhere.

Firstly, its clear he started out as a director purely focused on making the best movie he can make, and not something to suit the audience. There's no hero intro, dance numbers, unnecessary romance scenes to pad the runtime, which is just 105 minutes - uncharacteristically short for a Kollywood movie. The first half is almost perfect, goes by in a flash. Feels like you just started watching, and then the intermission card comes up. Extremely tight writing and pacing, incredible attention to detail, every scene shown has not one but multiple threads which will be tied later. 5/5. Minor part about the first half, whenever a movie references filmmaking (especially amateur filmmaking) in the movie itself, its always clear to me that the director is doing cinema out of passion for the craft and not as a way to get rich/famous. Jigarthanda shows the same thing, and its clear why they do it. When they're looking for plot threads, the simplest fall back is their own life, and what they have in their own life is filmmaking, often at an amateur level.

The movie somewhat falters in the second half. Crime thrillers usually have their biggest twists as the criminal reveal, and here its done very flatly. The director has chosen to add more twists elsewhere (the Gautham reveal and the Son twist) hoping to make up for it, which have their own flaws. The Gautham reveal requires a bit of suspension of disbelief but still okay. The Rajiv twist feels out of the blue because there has been no buildup for it. No mention of a son or a dead wife or a marriage in the first half at all. Atleast a slight mention of a constable asking Deepak about his son could have set up something. This is kind of surprising since he sets up the remaining plot points really well. Kind of feels like he needed to add twists just for the point of it (not surprising, given Karthick Naren's affinity towards Nolan). 3/5 for the second half.

Speaking of Karthick Naren, its an absolute tragedy what has happened to him since release. Atleast the other directors who started out making good movies mostly got to make movies with big stars and establish their name in the industry, but he is a fresh talent who has completely lost his way. Naragasooran looked very interesting but unfortunately stuck without release. Don't know what happened to his remaining crap, heard Maaran was rushed to fit Dhanush's schedule and now literally no one noticed his film which released last year. In an alternate timeline Naragsooran could have been released and became an even bigger hit, and big stars would have lined up to make tight slick action films with Naren. But unfortunately that isn't the timeline we live in.