Devil’s Double Next Level Movie Review: If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be trapped inside a YouTube comments section that somehow gained sentience and a film budget, DD Next Level offers a vivid, if not entirely welcome, simulation. Our guide through this experience is Kissa 47 (Santhanam), a film reviewer who wields ‘bro’ with the frequency of a machine gun, leaving the audience more shell-shocked by his vocabulary than by any on-screen jump scare. He and his entourage find themselves at an early screening for a film by the ominously named director Hitchcock Irudhayaraj (Selvaraghavan). The cinema itself looks like it was designed by someone with a personal vendetta against film critics, and before you can say “plot device,” Kissa and co. are unceremoniously zapped into the movie.

Now, the golden rule of logic-optional cinema is that if you’re going to play fast and loose with the plot, you’d better compensate with a relentless barrage of laughs. DD Next Level seems to have misplaced this memo somewhere between the script revisions. For a film headlined by Santhanam, a comedian usually capable of eliciting chuckles with ease, the actual laugh-out-loud moments are surprisingly sparse. Sadly, the movie relies too much on toilet humor and other easy jokes, which are just unfunny. The narrative, such as it is, bounces between settings – a cruise ship here, a mystical resort island there (think a cut-price White Lotus) – but the comedic spark remains stubbornly unlit.

The film leans heavily into the meta pool, with characters constantly winking at the camera about the filmmaking process, the nature of movie reviews, and the very fabric of their cinematic prison. A dash of self-awareness can be a delightful spice, but DD Next Level practically empties the whole jar into the pot. There are only so many times characters can exclaim, “Gosh, we’re in a movie!” before it transitions from clever to “yes, we gathered.” The excessive self-awareness kills the magic.

Santhanam himself, usually a whirlwind of comedic energy, feels somewhat constrained by dialogue that seldom lands a knockout punch, often defaulting to an endless stream of bros. One of the film’s more pleasant surprises is Mottai Rajendran’s Veenpechu Babu. His bewildered interactions, especially with Gautham Menon’s deadpan investigative officer (who communicates primarily in English to Rajendran’s blissfully ignorant nods), manage to mine some genuine humor. GVM, too, is in on the meta-joke, playing a version of his real-life persona, though like much of the self-referential humor, its success rate is variable. Meanwhile, the female characters are largely tasked with the thankless job of looking perpetually distressed, fulfilling the “scared ladies in a scary movie” trope with little room for nuance. It feels a bit like a Sundar C film sans the glamour and the usual masala.

On a technical level, the film isn’t without merit; the set designs are reasonably imaginative, and the VFX are competent. But these polished visuals serve as mere window dressing for a comedic structure that feels decidedly shaky. When the most memorable parts of your comedy are the awkward silences where the jokes were supposed to be, it’s a clear sign that the script might have needed a few more levels of refinement.

Written By: Abhinav Subramanian

Director: George Miller
Writers: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris
Stars: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Synopsis: In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a woman rebels against a tyrannical ruler in search for her homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners, a psychotic worshipper and a drifter named Max.

“As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy: me, or everyone else.” No better words describe the world of the Wasteland, a place plagued by war and famine and the complete collapse of society. In this world, the rules are clear: there are none. Survivors will do what they must to make it another day, even as fanatics and those establishing power across the Wasteland oppress more and more desperate people just wanting a morsel of what’s left. After an initial look into this destabilization in 1979’s Mad Max and a display of the monstrous nature of humanity, director George Miller expanded the Wasteland across its sequels The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome. Each movie showcased the best and worst of people, and the sickly approaches they would take to see the next day.

In Mad Max: Fury Road, this insidiousness is explored through the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who controls the supply of water in the Wasteland and gives very little to the thirsty, starved people below his Citadel. He has established himself as a divine being with a cultish following that hangs on his every word. His brethren, the War Boys, are malnourished and brainwashed men and women who live on ‘blood bags’ (people with enough blood still to ‘donate’ so the War Boys can keep going) and drive in Immortan’s name by worshipping him and honoring their ‘god,’ the V8 engine. When going after enemies and factions that may threaten them, they are willing to give their lives in the Immortan’s name, hoping to be ‘witnessed’ and ride to Valhalla to join the heroes of all time.

Like every movie in the series, this rule is eventually challenged by someone who decides they have had enough. In Fury Road, that’s Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a War Rig driver hauling cargo who decides to drive off-road, with the Immortan realizing quickly that Furiosa is also driving with his harem of wives (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Courtney Eaton, Riley Keough), and gives chase to her with his War Boys, like Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who hope to catch her and find favor in the Immortan’s eyes. And much like his involvement in the previous installments, Max (Tom Hardy) is in the middle of the action, as a blood bag to Nux at first and then driving along with Furiosa looking for a paradise within the ruins of the Wasteland.

All of this leads into one of the best action movies of the 21st century and, by extension, one of the finest ever made, with an ample amount of solid characterization, terrific dialogue that’s endlessly quotable, and phenomenal direction from Miller. Once Furiosa drives the War Rig out of the Citadel limits and towards Gas Town, the movie refuses to relent, even for a second. Powered by Tom Holkenborg’s thunderous score that is even personified in the movie in parts by the thrashing of the Doof Warrior’s flamethrowing guitar, Fury Road moves from one incredible setpiece to the next, from a chase where they battle the Buzzards, a rival faction, to one of the most visually spectacular sandstorms ever put to film, two brilliant canyon runs, and a tense nighttime sequence as the War Rig moves through a swamp. With the combination of John Seale’s incredible cinematography and fantastic visual effects, Fury Road soars as an action spectacle.

Yet throughout it all, the movie never forgets its characters, who are given ample development as the world around them goes to an even lower depth of hell. Everyone is broken, and trying to find some form of redemption and absolution for the things they have witnessed or the mistakes they have made, and wanting to be better people despite the world telling them they can’t. From Max’s tortured psyche due to his past failures to save everyone to Furiosa’s shattered past and lost family waiting to be found, to the wives of the Immortan Joe who find themselves at the precipice of a life with no shackles and futures that aren’t relegated to being child bearers for the warlord, and even Nux, a War Boy realizing his pursuit for Valhalla is more than pleasing a man who cares little for everyone else; the storytelling creates an emotional journey for them that by the time the credits roll, leaves audiences with a new set of favorites in the franchise.

10 years later, it’s no surprise that Mad Max: Fury Road has achieved the status it has in the pantheon of action cinema. A relentless two hours crescendos in a magnificent final chase in the other direction, with some of the finest stunt work and vehicular carnage of the century, giving every character a chance to shine and be a prominent part of the rampage, even incorporating that guitarist on a rig just powering everything with a crew of drummers behind him, and with a fascinating character piece that followed with 2024’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, it creates a picture perfect arc for the character as well. In the end, it rides eternal, shiny and chrome.

Grade: A+

LOS ANGELES, May 14 (UPI) — Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, in theaters May 23, delivers on the level of the franchise’s most recent films once it gets going. It does, however, have the slowest start of all eight Mission: Impossible movies.

In 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) took on the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) to retrieve the key that unlocks the source code of the rogue artificial intelligence known as The Entity. Final Reckoning opens two months later, with Ethan unsure what to do with such power.

As The Entity holds hostage all of cyberspace and the world’s electronics, including military weapons, there is a deadline before the AI will control the world. That is, if Ethan doesn’t stop it first.

The plan to destroy The Entity requires Ethan’s teammates, hackers Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Gabriel’s turncoat assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff). The mission is complicated by U.S. President Sloane (Angela Bassett) sending agents to recover The Entity’s controls for U.S. purposes, which Ethan knows will backfire.