Because of its desperate attempts to appear vibrant and cool, Athiradi compromises on the basics: emotions. While Arun and Paulson could have completely avoided it and made the movie a battle of male egos, the writers have also tried to anchor the narrative emotionally to give it more gravity. However, these moments and plot devices — even Sam’s brother’s recorded speech, which is actually pivotal to the narrative — fail to generate the desired impact and end up feeling quite dull. Even the conflict-building is unimpressive, preventing the rising stakes from truly resonating with the viewer. While the point of no return and the interval block are presented grandly, the build-up to them is shallow, thereby detracting from their overall impact. The lack of depth in the characters, including Sam and Kuttan, worsens the situation, particularly since they display excessive theatrics without meaningful justification for their behaviour. Worse still, the jokes just don’t land at all.
Mollywood Times Movie Review & Rating: Trust me here; Mollywood Times indeed had the potential to be a masterpiece. There are several moments in the movie where director Abhinav Sunder Nayak and writer Ramu Sunil’s sheer brilliance knock our socks off. The movie’s core ideas, as well as the way they are presented at various junctures, are nothing short of spellbinding. However, just as Vineeth Madhavan’s (Naslen) obsession with becoming “the best” filmmaker in his field leads to his downfall, Mollywood Times’ obstinacy in being a one-of-a-kind film might have cost the dark comedy dearly, as its focus shifts solely to this mission after a point, overlooking its soul.
What if sci-fi movies and literature have been lying to us all along? What if extraterrestrial beings (aliens) don’t have any superpowers and may well be, in essence, our mirror images, with the only difference being that technology in their world is so advanced that interstellar travel is possible for them?
Although Prathichaya’s visuals have the depth and sharpness found in today’s Malayalam cinema to an extent, thanks to Chandru Selvaraj’s cinematography, the writing never actually hits the mark and hovers around the middle, rendering the movie an old wine in a new bottle. While its overall visual fabric is serviceable, the frames aren’t always impressive, as the sheer number of tight and canted-angle shots is unnecessarily high.
However, Jiyen Krishnakumar fails miserably in this regard, almost making one wonder if the movie even had a director during its production, given the mediocre-to-shoddy execution evident throughout.
I'm not talking about a scenario like Bharatham (1991), where eminent Carnatic singer Kalloor Ramanathan (Nedumudi Venu) fails to deliver a musical performance while three sheets to the wind, thus making a fool of himself.
Unfortunately, these are the only good things about the drama. Its writing, in particular, is heavily underwhelming. Even though the movie unfolds pretty much like director C Prem Kumar’s ’96 (2018), Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), or even MT Vasudevan Nair’s Oru Cheru Punchiri (2000), one of the major issues with Chinna Chinna Aasai is that the conversations between the central duo are barely interesting. Not that they ought to have discussed highly engaging topics, but we simply don’t feel any emotional connection to the dialogues. Basically, their conversations are quite soulless.
In fact, as I was watching Gatta Kusthi 2, I couldn’t help but feel a renewed respect for director Basil Joseph’s sports comedy Godha (2017) for offering an entertaining watch without relegating the sport or its female lead to the background.
While his parodic tracks are fun to listen to as singles, they only detract from the overall experience when in movies, and the extremely disappointing music of Magic Mushrooms serves as a testament to this.
While Parimala and Co isn’t one of the worst Tamil movies to have come out in recent times, it gets under one’s skin throughout, as it feels like one of the most lazily written and conceived mainstream commercial Tamil films in recent memory. Despite its core being a tried-and-true (and even hackneyed, to be honest) whodunit, even its story has been developed in an unimpressive manner, let alone its script.
While this is a commendable approach, Mahesh’s script ultimately falls flat, with mediocre writing throughout that fails to elevate Patriot to its true potential. As much as he has tried to stick to the genre, he has inadvertently focused too much on the specifics and details, rendering the script lifeless. He should really have entrusted the writing to someone else and focused solely on filmmaking. At the very least, he should have collaborated with a co-writer who has a knack for creating drama and writing sharp dialogues. Patriot’s biggest drawback, even with its impressive visuals, is the sheer lack of soul and depth in the narrative.
In fact, there are several scenes and situations in Prakambanam where it comes across as yet another savarna project that slyly trashes progressive ideologies, particularly Leftism, while presenting Brahmanism, and by extension Hindutva, as the ultimate, all-encompassing truth. For instance, there’s a scene in the movie where Siddharth is gearing up to deliver an election speech. Since he and members of his party are widely regarded as loafers and troublemakers, there’s already significant animosity towards them. As he gets on stage with his prepared speech that contains too many complex terms — a running joke against Leftists since the Sandesham (1991) era — others start booing him. Meanwhile, the “grandma mode” is activated in Punyalan, and s/he delivers a speech instead, invoking verses from the Bhagavad Gita, which entice everyone. In fact, the movie portrays Siddharth winning the elections solely because of this speech, without doing anything else.
