Parents' Guide to 3

3 is a jumbled, overlong mess, redeemed only by the attractiveness of its two lead actors, Dhanush and Haasan. The song-and-dance scenes typical of Indian cinema are long and drawn-out, yet entertaining enough on their own. But are they suitable for this movie? No. The tone is the problem, and these choreographic extravaganzas have no useful place in a film that is essentially about the tragedy of mental illness.

But the mess spreads further than that. The director is the wife of lead actor Dhanush and that may be why so much screen time is devoted to lingering and lingering and lingering on his lovely face. This adds nothing to our understanding of the character nor does it move along a plot that, at 145 minutes, desperately needs moving along. With weak direction and shallow dialogue, the actors are left with few options but to engage in desperate overacting, flailing, and crying. Some crying scenes go on so puzzlingly long that one might conclude the director figured she squeezed so much great crying out of her actors, why let any of it go to waste? Characters morph from one kind of person to another, with no build-up or foreshadowing, and only a truckload of intermittently released flashbacks unravel what's going on. The film means to tell a great love story and our heartstrings should accordingly be plucked, but this elicits nothing short of boredom and a distinct regret for the sunk costs we've invested in watching it.