I am Game Movie Review: Dulquer Salmaan’s Malayalam Comeback

Dan John is the kind of man who has never needed a real job, because he trusts a coin flip more than he trusts effort.

He gambles compulsively, mostly to spite a father he can’t stand, and the film opens content to watch him spiral without much urgency.

Then an accident takes his hand, quite literally, and a transplant gives him someone else’s.

That new hand doesn’t just heal.

It changes him, nudging the story out of gambling-drama territory and into something closer to a supernatural thriller with superhero instincts.

The setting matters here too, because Hidhayath places most of the action in Hyderabad rather than Kerala, folding in Tamil characters and a Chennai-based cricket franchise called the Madras Raging Bulls without ever explaining why the geography is so loose.

It’s a strange choice on paper, but it frees the film from the burden of local realism almost immediately.

Within the first ten minutes, you’re not questioning the logic anymore, you’re just along for whatever comes next.

Dulquer is doing exactly what he’s built a career on, playing the spoiled, directionless man-child with genuine warmth underneath the immaturity.

The stretch where Dan first realizes what his new hand can do is the liveliest part of the film, full of the kind of awkward self-discovery that actually lands as funny rather than forced.

Mysskin, playing David Abraham, the owner of the Raging Bulls and the film’s central gambling kingpin, brings a stillness that works well against Dulquer’s restlessness.

Antony Varghese, reuniting with his RDX director, gets a genuinely meaty arc as a cricketer named Vicky whose fate gets tangled up with Dan’s in ways the trailers wisely kept quiet about.

The production itself is hard to argue with.

Shot over 156 days across more than a hundred locations, the film has a polish that most Malayalam productions simply don’t attempt, and it shows in the scale of the action choreography and the confidence of the camera movement.

The trouble starts right around the interval, and it doesn’t really recover.

What begins as a wild, high-concept swing settles into a fairly ordinary revenge plot once the second half kicks in, and a lot of the tension the first half built just evaporates.

The film gestures at ideas worth exploring, greed, what money does to a spoiled rich kid, how betting corrodes something as innocent as a cricket match, and then drops every single one of them the moment they get interesting.

Samyuktha Viswanathan and Kayadu Lohar are both saddled with roles that exist mainly to support the men around them, which feels like a waste given how much time the film has to spend.

At close to three hours, the back half needed real trims, not more incident, and you can feel the editing straining to hold a script that keeps adding rather than tightening.

Jakes Bejoy is doing some of his most committed work here, and it’s the one department that never lets up.

The background score carries scenes that the writing can’t, especially in the action sequences, where it supplies the urgency the plotting sometimes forgets to earn.

“Mazhavillaye,” sung by Armaan Malik, works well as a standalone track, and the reported scale of the film’s music rights deal tells you Zee Music clearly expected it to travel.

Whether the songs are placed with any real purpose inside the story is a separate question, but as pure sound design and score, this is Bejoy operating at full stretch.

Not entirely, and that’s the honest read on it.

I’m Game has a premise nobody else in Malayalam cinema has attempted, and for a stretch it genuinely earns the comparisons to superhero origin stories that critics have been reaching for.

But a film this expensive and this ambitious needed its second half to match the invention of its first, and instead it retreats into something far more familiar the moment the plot demands consequences.

Dulquer carries more of it than the script deserves, and the technical craft on display, from the cinematography by Jimshi Khalid to the production design, is never in question.

It’s the writing that loses its nerve.