By Ayesha Khan 
Chennai, October 22: There’s something disarmingly familiar about Pradeep Ranganathan on screen. He walks, talks, and worries like every twenty-something caught between impulse and insecurity. In Keerthiswaran’s Dude, that restless energy drives an entire film equal parts romantic comedy and half-serious social commentary, which works just fine until it begins trying too hard to mean something.
The film opened worldwide on October 17, right in the thick of the Diwali weekend. Against all odds and competition, it exploded out of the gate, raking in ₹10 crore on day on,e the best start of Ranganathan’s career. By day four, Dude had already crossed ₹40 crore, according to The Times of India. For a debut director and a relatively grounded story, those are blockbuster numbers.
A Love Story That Refuses to Play It Safe
At first glance, Dude looks like a breezy campus rom-com. Boy meets girl, jokes fly, music plays. But Keerthiswaran isn’t interested in keeping it that simple. He builds the film around a hotheaded, self-absorbed man who slowly learns to listen to women, to himself, and to the idea of being wrong.
The first half is a riot. Pradeep nails the tone, cocky yet oddly vulnerable, and Mamitha Baiju gives the kind of performance that feels lived-in, not performed. She’s calm where he’s chaos, sharp when he’s stumbling. Their scenes crackle with awkward energy, the kind that reminds you of early love, messy, fast, and sometimes painfully honest.
It’s when the film shifts gears after the interval that the cracks start to show. The humour fades, the pace drags, and suddenly, Dude wants to be a message movie. It’s not that the message is misplaced; Keerthiswaran genuinely wants to say something about emotional maturity and gender expectations. But the film begins spelling out what it had been showing so cleverly.
Critics have been kind but cautious. The Times of India called it “a rare mainstream hero-elevation film that addresses a relevant issue convincingly.” India Today gave it a similar 3 out of 5, saying the film “works best when it embraces its absurdity rather than preaches.” Others, like GreatAndhra, found it “engaging but inconsistent,” while 123Telugu summed it up as “watchable, but uneven.”
The Box Office Doesn’t Care About Mixed Reviews
If the reviews have been split, the box office hasn’t noticed. Dude has been riding the kind of word-of-mouth most films would kill for. College audiences have turned out in large numbers, and theaters in Chennai and Coimbatore reported near-full houses throughout the long weekend.
By Day 2, the film had made nearly ₹20 crore in India. The Telugu-dubbed version contributed a substantial amount to the worldwide gross, which surpassed ₹30 crore by Sunday. Not bad for a movie whose biggest weapon is not scale or spectacle, but conversation, the kind people have after stepping out of the theatre, arguing whether the hero deserved the girl at all.
On X (formerly Twitter), fans have been split but loud. “Gen-Z rom-com done right!” one user wrote. Another quipped that “the first half’s energy vanishes like a phone battery after 10 p.m.” The divide feels genuine, not a fan war, just honest reactions to a film trying to speak the language of its time.
Off Screen, a Scare and a Lesson
The film’s promotional run got a dose of real drama when Mamitha Baiju narrowly escaped an accident during a celebration event in Kerala. A stage prop a “fire gun” meant to shoot sparks misfired. Videos showed her flinching as the device went out of control. Thankfully, she wasn’t hurt, but the clip spread fast, prompting questions about safety standards at film promotions.
For Mamitha, who handled it with poise, the incident only added to her growing visibility. For fans, it was a reminder that behind the glossy lights of film events, basic safety often takes a back seat.
A Film That Mirrors Its Generation
Dude isn’t perfect. It’s impulsive, overlong, and occasionally overconfident. But that might be the point. It reflects the people, it’s about a generation that overthinks, overreacts, and still manages to find tenderness amid the noise.
What keeps the film alive is Pradeep Ranganathan’s instinct for timing. He knows how to turn awkwardness into humour, guilt into charm. Mamitha matches him note for note, grounding the chaos. Together, they lift a film that might otherwise have drowned in its own cleverness.
Keerthiswaran, for his part, shows promise. His writing has flashes of sharp observation, the kind of dialogue that feels overheard, not written. You wish he had trusted that voice a little more instead of leaning on familiar tropes in the second half.
Why “Dude” Matters Anyway
If Love Today captured the paranoia of relationships in the digital age, Dude takes that idea forward, showing what happens when you actually try to grow up. The film’s imperfections make it feel oddly real, as though it’s being written in real time by its own characters.
And maybe that’s why audiences are responding. For all its flaws, Dude feels like it comes from a place of truth that awkward, funny, half-sincere corner of modern romance that Tamil cinema is just beginning to explore with confidence.
For now, it’s safe to say Dude is a hit. Whether it will age well is another question. But it’s left a mark not for perfection, but for trying to speak honestly to a crowd that’s tired of being told what love should look like.
Verdict:
Dude is clumsy, charming, and entirely human, much like the people it’s about. It stumbles often but rarely feels fake.
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- Ayesha Khanhttps://hindustanherald.in/author/ayesha/
- Ayesha Khanhttps://hindustanherald.in/author/ayesha/
- Ayesha Khanhttps://hindustanherald.in/author/ayesha/
- Ayesha Khanhttps://hindustanherald.in/author/ayesha/
Ananya Sharma and Ayesha Khan