Martin review: Dhruva Sarja aces the action scenes; but the film is a letdown

Martin review: When a movie has been three years in the making and marketed extensively across the country as a high-octane action entertainer, audience expectations skyrocket. Given that this is also a Kannada movie, the audience keeps KGF and Kantara as their benchmarks when they walk into the theatre. Kannada actor Dhruva Sarja’s Martin is the film one is talking about. (Also Read: Fans complain as morning shows of Dhruva Sarja’s Martin are cancelled without notice: ‘What’s going on?’)
Martin’s story has been penned by south actor Arjun Sarja, Dhruva’s uncle. Arjun is known for his action films that have a high dose of patriotism and Martin has a lot of the former given that Dhruva Sarja is known as ‘Action Prince’ in the Kannada film industry.
The film revolves around Arjun, an IRS officer, and Martin, the crazy antagonist (both roles played by Dhruva). The two men are like chalk and cheese and when they butt heads it is all chaos. And in the AP Arjun-directed Martin, it is literally chaos as well.
The director begins the film with an episode in a Pakistani prison from where a powerful gangster, Martin, escapes lands up in Mumbai. He wants to get hold of Arjun and in this process, does other illegal activities along the way. And their connection and confrontation forms the rest of the film.
The botched up story is filled with loopholes and the other characters in the film are not well-written. In fact, the film is all over the place with logic going out the window. Sample this – the men in Pakistan speak Kannada.
Dhruva is an out and out action man in this film and that’s what the filmmakers have capitalised on to make Martin work. But just action scenes without a compelling narrative taking the story forward doesn’t engage the audience and the writer and director have both widely missed the mark on this front. Added to this, the VFX is also poor and the editing was shoddy.
The BGM by Ravi Basrur doesn’t compare to what the music director has done in other films (Salaar, KGF) and the songs by Mani Sharma are average and remind you of recent hits. With the movie touted as a big-budget flick, technically it has failed in many areas.
For Dhruva, this movie was meant to be a major milestone in his career but Martin has turned out to be all hype with no substance. He may have aced the action scenes but for his career, this film is likely to be a setback. For director AP Arjun, this was a test of sorts since he was directing a big action film for the first time and he seems to have clearly failed the test. For actor-producer Arjun, this movie shows story writing is not his forte and perhaps it’s best left to professionals.
At the end of the film, the question – what was this story trying to convey – comes up and there is just no answer. Martin is a hot mess and definitely not in a good way.