Survival dramas are not easy to execute. The Nayanthara starrer, O2, now out on Disney+ Hotstar, despite an interesting premise, fails to impress or sustain its dramatic appeal. A bus from Coimbatore to Kochi gets trapped in a landslide and slips so deep inside the earth that its eight passengers are left in a rarefied zone with very little oxygen. It will last only a few hours, and there is a sick child travelling.
Parvathy (Nayanthara) is taking her little son, Veera (Ritwik) for a complicated surgery to a Kochi hospital, where he would be cured of his congenital problem. He cannot breathe without an oxygen kit.
The bus has a motley group of passengers: Rafiq is planning to elope with his girlfriend Mitra, who is in the same bus chaperoned by her father. Police Inspector Karunai Rajan has a bag of cocaine which he plans to sell. And there is a just-released prisoner. When these people get stuck under mud and rocks, it is question of life and death, and with a cylinder of oxygen in Parvathy’s care, a fight breaks out amongst the passengers.
We know how the two-hour long film would wind up, but with a rescue operation that not only appears amateurishly executed, but also has been written most unconvincingly, O2 may well slip to the lowest depths of audience appeal.
Nayanthara’s earlier Aramm about a child being rescued from a deep open well was scripted with singular focus and had her playing a District Collector. The movie was gripping, and was lauded for the way it stayed on course.
But O2 wanders with a pair of lovers (an elopement thrown in), a drug runner and a prisoner who is just out enjoying his first flush of freedom. Writer-director Viknesh fails to connect these threads. In the end, the narrative about a sick boy being rushed for treatment by his mother gets so diluted that we forget all about Veera and Parvathy. It is the stories surrounding them that gather momentum, eclipsing the core narrative.
Technically, there are lip-sync flaws, and logic has been shown the door.
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