The first one hour of Nirangal Moondru sets the stage for an epic showdown. The lives of three and a half men meet at a crucial juncture — One needs an answer, one needs a resolution, one needs a reason, and one needs a rational explanation. It is wonderful how every single person’s needs seems to be intertwined with the actions of the others. There is a wonderful build-up to the phenomenon of cause and effect. Even if it all unravels pretty soon, the first hour is fascinating.

‘Technicolour’ seems to be the word of the week when it comes to the releases this Friday. If The Colours Within and Wicked from two different corners of the world are technicolour spectacles, director Karthick Naren’s latest outing, Nirangal Moondru, not only makes for an addition to that list but also treats the three-color process as a metaphor for the men who populate its vibrant world.

By now, plasticity has become a sort of director Karthick Naren’s style. A sense of juvenility creeps in with the premise and setups of the director, despite a fairly decent execution and technical competence. A sample of such contrived writing comes even at the beginning of the first act when one of the protagonists, Sri (Dushyanth Jayaprakash), argues with his parents to let him own a mobile phone. The deliberation to establish that the character doesn’t have a cell phone is to thwart the audience from finding any logical loopholes. The problem with such writing renders Nirangal Moondru staged and artificial, distancing the audience from the characters and their stakes.