REVIEW 762: BIG BROTHER

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:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/big-brother-movie-review-mohanlal-kicks-off-2020-with-the-worlds-most-boring-film-7915791.html

Posters courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/BigBrotherMovieOfficial/

REVIEW 603: B.TECH

Release date:	Kerala: May 5, Delhi: May 18, 2018
Director:	Mridul Nair
Cast: Language:	Asif Ali, Arjun Ashokan, Aparna Balamurali, Niranjana Anoop, Anoop Menon, Sreenath Bhasi, Deepak Parambol, Saiju Kurup, Alencier Ley Lopez Malayalam

If I have to watch one more Malayalam film set in an engineering college where students – mostly men – skip classes, get into fights with rivals, mistreat teachers, ogle women and while away their time drinking, even as the director chronicles their lives with indulgent affection, I might retire into a hut in the Himalayas.

Well past the halfway mark in B.Tech, just as I was about to google real estate prices in Uttarakhand and Himachal … boom! … something happened to draw attention back to the events unfolding on screen. Mridul Nair must explain why he chose to devote almost two-thirds of his film to goings-on as old as the hills in Malayalam cinema, when the sharp and politically relevant crux of B.Tech lies in the subsequent one-third.

Asif Ali in B.Tech plays Anand Subrahmanyam, an angst-ridden student of Bangalore’s Wisdom Institute of Technology (WIT), who is now in his eighth year in college. Engineering institutes are a dime a dozen in the city and, as he puts it, there are more engineers in this country than there are mosquitoes. He and his gang of layabouts make the situation worse for themselves by doing nothing about it.

Anand is the de facto head of the group that includes fellow students JoJo (Sreenath Bhasi) and Nissar Ahamed (Deepak Parambol), unemployed alumnus Prashanth Puthenveetil (Saiju Kurup) and the token woman, Ananya Vishwanathan (Niranjana Anoop). They hang out at Fathima Café whose owner Syed Ali Kuttiparambil (Alencier Ley Lopez) dotes on these freeloaders. Anand’s girlfriend Priya (Aparna Balamurali) is not a no-hoper like the rest. She is perennially angry with him and he is constantly inconsiderate towards her, but well, a hero’s gotta have a girlfriend, y’know.

Enter: Azad Mohammed (Arjun Ashokan), a virtuous child from Payannur. He gels with them despite being a first-year student and evidently earnest about his studies.

Azad’s arrival notwithstanding, this is a plot filled with generic characters in a generic setting who are even given a generic song, Ore nila ore veyil, through which they ride around the city on motorbikes looking generically cool. Just to prove how with-it they are, Nissar is called Puffs, Puffs leers at the neighbour’s wife’s and daughters’ panties hanging on a clothes line, and a bottle of hard liquor is called Sunny Leone. So hip, na?

The entire pre-interval portion is devoted to familiar antics that are very occasionally funny, but mostly not. The top-notch cinematography by Manoj Kumar Khatoi and overall polished packaging matter little in such a scenario.

The acting by the youngsters and Lopez is fair enough. Arjun Ashokan is especially sweet and gets us emotionally involved with his Azad. Anoop Menon, on the other hand, gives a stilted performance as Ananya’s lawyer Dad.

B.Tech inexplicably has Malayalam subtitles embedded in the print for English dialogues but not for Hindi dialogues. Is it this team’s contention that the film’s primary audience (read: Malayalis) understands Hindi and not basic English? Really?

Hold your cynical horses though. Early on we get a hint that writer Ramakrishna J. Kulur and writer-director Mridul Nair are not ordinary minds in a scene in the WIT principal’s office in which a teacher (Aju Varghese) gets Azad to take off his skullcap while having no problem whatsoever with a turbanned Sikh standing just inches away. If his was a sincere in-principle objection to external manifestations of religion, then, err, umm…

This is a truly great moment, not because it draws attention to Azad’s Muslim identity, but because the presence of the other gentleman in the room along with Azad raises a question that even liberals rarely have the guts to ask Islamophobes in India. Besides, it is so fleeting and executed without a fuss, that for a while I wondered whether Messrs Nair and Kulur had meant anything by it. They did. And they leave it there to simmer in the viewer’s mind until many scenes later when Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir is referenced, once again unfussily and in passing. Also gently woven into the otherwise run-of-mill, over-stretched narrative is a scene at a police station I will not describe here, and you begin to hope that at some stage this will go somewhere other than the boring route taken by innumerable Mollywood campus flicks.

It does. And when that happens, B.Tech fearlessly shames an Indian establishment steeped in prejudice against the Muslim community. Unfortunately the film takes too long to get to its politically explosive portion, and even when it does, the treatment of the sensitive matter is infused with commercial cinema conventions. For instance, in a scene that is designed as a nod to the scorching intensity of Kanhaiya Kumar’s azaadi slogans, actors pose around looking grim and a looooong song plays loudly in the background when the police charge at them.

Storywise, B.Tech has so much going for it by now, but subtracts from its own impact by stressing and restressing every point made either by showing characters play out episodes already recounted by others or with its high-decibel soundtrack that is used to underline emotions and actions already conveyed by the actors.

Having come out admirably with all guns blazing in its condemnation of Islamophobia within the police, B.Tech falters when a lawyer slams a policeman in court for stereotyping an entire community because of the crimes of a minority among them. No doubt this is a well-intended statement, but offered as it is without any addendum, it is also not far removed from the “all terrorists are Muslims but all Muslims are not terrorists” cliché in a world where a bearded, brown-skinned chap engineering a bomb blast will automatically be deemed an aatankwaadi / teevravadi, but the President of a global superpower does not earn the same label despite invading a foreign country under the pretext that it was hiding weapons of mass destruction, and within India, the tag is yet to be bestowed on those who plan ‘spontaneous’ beef-related lynchings and ‘riots’ in which minority community members are raped and murdered.

In its analysis of communal politics then, B.Tech is unexpectedly evolved, but not enough. Its failure to take its liberalism to a higher level might still have been excusable considering the real-life context in which it has been made, where open expressions of hatred are now so prevalent that any gesture of reconciliation comes as a relief. What is inexcusable though is the way the film lazily ambles through an unoriginal campus set-up for what seems like aeons before getting to the point.

A glass half empty could be viewed as half full by an optimist. B.Tech is a glass two-thirds empty. It takes more patience than I possess to view it as one-third full.  

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	146 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/b-tech-movie-review-two-thirds-dull-and-generic-one-third-sharp-and-politically-relevant-4476113.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/btechmovie/