Rebel

Rebel Movie Synopsis: In the early 1980s, two Tamil students from Munnar got admission at a college in Palakkad. The oppression and bullying they face there and how they retaliate make up for the rest of the film.



Rebel Movie Review: On a basic level, Rebel tells a tale of emancipation about how the oppressed stand up to their oppressors. In the film, the oppressed are the Tamil students studying at Chittur College, an institution in the Palakkad district of Kerala. They comprise 25% of the whole student population of that college. Meanwhile, the oppressors are the Malayali students, who view the Tamil students as inferior and only use them for their political gains.



The film, which has been reported to be based on true events, tells the heart-rending tale of the bullying and oppression faced by Tamil students as they go for studies in the neighbouring state of Kerala. But the makers seem to have not fully grasped that they are telling a truly heart-rending tale as they try to make it superfluous by not putting that much weight into the film’s staging and especially the characterization of the antagonists (and there are a few of them in this film).



Rebel is a full-on commercial outing. This is not a film in which you will find any deviations from the cliched formula. The manner in which the story unfolds isn't pristine or new. The protagonist Kathir’s (GV Prakash Kumar) fight for being treated right and his journey to overthrow the injustices he faces due to his being Tamil are effective on a basic level. The makers overdo it by adding one cliched scene after another to stress the terrible plight he is in. And you know that it has been curated with the intention of pulling your strings rather than as a part of the narrative. These scenes feel cliched in more ways than one.



When the Tamil students initially enter the college, they are not even allowed to stay with the Malayali students. Instead, they have to stay in the B Hostel, where there's limited facilities. But the makers then go overboard in how they choose to present the college chairman’s bullying of the students. He sits down in a chair with a cigarette in his hand and lets out an evil laugh. What he does to a Tamil student then is crude, but the character is established in such a caricaturish manner that we can't take him seriously. He feels like an amalgamation of all cliches into one rather than a real person.