Release
date:
|
January 16, 2020
|
Director:
|
Siddique
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Mohanlal, Sarjano Khalid, Mirnaa Menon,
Arbaaz Khan, Gaadha, Honey Rose, Siddique, Anoop Menon, Vishnu Unnikrishnan,
Asif Basra, Irshad, Tini Tom, Devan
Malayalam
|
When a
man has spent 24 years of his life behind bars, adjusting to the world outside would obviously be a challenge. Mohanlal
plays one such chap, 40-something-year-old Sachidanandan
who was convicted for murder as a teenager and two dozen years
later is now set for life outside a prison cell.
You
heard that right: Lalettan, who turns 60 this summer, plays a character who has
barely crossed 40 in Big Brother. That should have
been the first warning sign that this film would turn out to be yet another
embarrassing misadventure in the superstar’s filmography that has for at least
a decade now been dominated by repetitive, unimaginative works desperately
trying to convince audiences that he is forever young and forever attractive to
women young enough to be his granddaughters.
Towards
the latter end, Big Brother stars a
baby-faced girl called Mirnaa Menon who falls for Sachidanandan and looks moony-eyed at him throughout a stereotypically shot song
sequence in which she is dressed in flowy, frothy chiffon attire. You know the
type of number that has been featured in formulaic commercial Indian cinema
across language industries for about two decades? (Possibly to pre-empt all lampooning, the kid admirer’s feelings are
described by one character as an instance of Stockholm Syndrome because of the
circumstances in which she gets acquainted with Sachidanandan.)
Cliché
is piled upon cliché, one dull turn of events is piled upon another in this
film written and directed by Siddique.
Big Brother is about how Sachidanandan’s efforts to adjust
to freedom are eclipsed by a faceless, omniscient drug kingpin called Edwin
Moses. Why Moses is after him is a question the uninteresting answer to which
comes in the climax. Through the inexorable 2 hours and 45 minutes that pass
between the beginning and the end of this torturous film, we meet Sachidanandan’s brothers
Vishnu (Anoop Menon) and Manu (Sarjano Khalid), Vishnu’s wife
Vandana (Honey Rose), other family members with whom he is living and Manu’s
girlfriend Gemini (Gaadha) in addition to three flunkeys played by Irshad, Tini
Tom and Vishnu Unnikrishnan. The script gives none of these people anything to
remember them by apart from the well-known stars playing some of them. And yes,
I repeat in case you did not notice, little Sarjano Khalid from June has been cast as Sachidanandan’s brother in Big Brother, no doubt to further
convince us of Lalettan’s eternal youth.
(Pause)
(Further pause)
Oops, Big Brother was such a sleeping pill that I dozed off while writing that last paragraph.
So where were we? Ah yes, Manu was instrumental in securing
his elder sibling’s release from jail. When he and Gemini are attacked for unknown
reasons by a violent gang, Sachidanandan is forced to circumvent the law to
rescue the boy.
Another purportedly significant character in Big Brother is a
north Indian cop played by Arbaaz Khan who has just been posted in southern
India to hunt down Edwin Moses. This is the Bollywood actor’s Mollywood debut.
Why Mollywood sought him out is a mystery. Khan brings nothing to this role
except expressionlessness and gets nothing out of it except the challenge of
delivering poorly written dialogues that awkwardly mix Hindi and English with
Malayalam. Veteran actor Siddique too is cast in a pointless role in this pointless
enterprise.
One of the few positives I could find in Big Brother is
that stray Hindi dialogues are accompanied by Malayalam subtitles embedded in
the print.
One of
the few innovations I can recall from this film is the villain sending
explosives-laden toy cars to chase the hero and his sidekicks in a godown. But
that high lasts just for a few seconds. There is also a reference
early on to an unusual natural ability Sachidanandan possesses. That too, after
a while, plays little to no part in the proceedings. A rather sensational
example of systemic police corruption revealed in the beginning again comes to
nought.
For a
film that is supposed to be a thriller, Big Brother offers zero excitement after the
initial fleeting suspense over how the hero once used his extraordinary gift
for an extraordinary purpose.
There
is absolutely nothing by which to recommend Siddique’s Big Brother.
Even Mohanlal’s acting here is meh, and considering how stiff-limbed he is, it
is amusing to the point of being sad to see scenes in which he has to, among other things,
single-handedly overpower a supervillain, fly through the air and send men
flying with his fists.
Feel the “Lalhood” – that was the tagline flashed at the end of Big Brother’s trailer.
Maybe “Lalhood” is a new word for the world’s most boring film.
Rating (out
of 5 stars): 0.25
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
Running time:
|
165 minutes
|
This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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