Review: I'm Game

I'm Game spends its first half being exactly the kind of unhinged, confident entertainer its marketing promised, then spends its second unlearning everything that made it work. Dulquer Salmaan plays Dan John, a compulsive gambler dragged into a fantastical underworld, with a loose, committed energy that suits the film's early chaos. A pre-interval set piece built around a bar brawl is genuinely the high point, stylish and unpredictable in ways that suggest director Nahas Hidhayath, coming off the success of RDX, had something fresh in mind.

Then the interval hits and the film loses its nerve. What should have been a tight back half instead spends nearly forty minutes on a flashback explaining a backstory the audience has already largely pieced together, grinding the momentum to a halt right when the plot most needed to accelerate. Kayadu Lohar and the supporting cast, strong in the film's freewheeling opening stretch, are left with little to do once the story turns into an overlong explanation of itself. Jakes Bejoy's score is a genuine asset throughout even when the film around it stalls.

Then the interval hits and the film loses its nerve.

Three stars. There is a genuinely fun film in the first half of I'm Game, confident enough to hide its own fantasy premise from the marketing and let audiences discover it fresh. It just never figures out how to be that same film once the flashbacks start.