Whenever Tamil filmmakers wish to direct a slick thriller, they immediately pack their bags and leave for Kodaikanal or Ooty. How else can you make a thriller without people in leather jackets and costumes that aren’t suitable for the sweaty plains of the state? And why should the characters be in such costumes? Because that’s what the American shows have, and naturally, the local inspirations carry not just the content but also the aesthetics. It just betrays the lack of originality of our creators and writers, who come up with narratives that are far removed from the reality or people in which the story is set. Snakes and Ladders is no exception to such a tiring trend. It is about four mischievous boys in a fictitious hill town Rettamugdu in Kodaikanal. When a thief attempts to rob the house of one of the four friends, the boy locks him inside a kitchen cupboard and suffocates him to death. The four friends then team up to hide the unintentional murder but find themselves committing more crimes. Meanwhile, the gang members of the dead thief are on a hunt to find their own as he has an antique locket that is worth million.
As a story, Snakes and Ladders has the premise of an Enid Blyton or The Hardy Boys novel. However, some things need to be lost in translation as a choice. All children live in houses that look like mansions and all of their parents are alien to the ethos of a rural town in Kodaikanal. These are artificially manufactured characters that would suit the narrative. Take the example of Gilbert aka Gilly, the unintentional murderer. Gilly’s parents are away from him for years and he grows up with his grandparents. Now, his grandfather has Alzheimer’s disease and poor eyesight, he cannot see that a body is getting buried and exhumed every other night. About the constant exhuming, we get dialogues that are added as an afterthought wherein the boys lament about the body being rotten and reeking. Just because the series addresses a flaw or contrivance, it doesn’t mean it is fixed. In contrast, it just makes the mistakes more pronounced.
Sample another silly writing: One of the two bosses of the deceased thief, Leo (Naveen Chandra), works for an agency that sells CCTV cameras. He rents a house in Rettamugdu, which also ‘happens’ to be the house of one of the boys. It doesn’t matter that the boy’s father is a police officer. “It is good, in a way,” says Leo. For the writers, sure.
The most problematic aspect of the series is the characterisation of the lead characters, the four boys. These are a bunch of obnoxious kids who you can’t root for. They are miscreants who deserve action from the juvenile justice board. Instead, the series tries to make them heroic grey characters. At times, it even tries to imbibe some humour. The father of one of the four finds out about their crimes, and the brats tie him up. Gilly feeds him only bread and says, “Grandma has made poori today, but if I give you that, it will lead to trouble for both parties (looking at the rear of the hapless father).” The idea is to fix a logical flaw. The writers are worried that the viewer would wonder about the bowel activities of the captive. That is the least of the problems in Snakes and Ladders. This is not to say that small logical flaws don’t affect a series, but when the whole of the narrative is a contrived mess, fixing the parts doesn’t mean anything.
While the child artists have performed well, they don’t leave a mark because they can only do so much with weak writing. There are no definitions for each character. They don’t go through any transition or arc. They don’t have a character to begin with. It is just ironic that Snakes and Ladders are about a bunch of kids doing all adult stuff, but the writers who conjured them up resort to puerility.
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