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 705: CHILDREN’S PARK

Release date:	Kerala: June 5, 2019 Delhi: June 14, 2019
Director:	Shafi
Cast: Language:	Sharafudheen, Vishnu Unnikrishnan, Dhruvan, Joy Mathew, Hareesh Kanaran, Gayathri Suresh, Manasa Radhakrishnan, Sowmya Menon, Shivaji Guruvayoor Malayalam and Tamil with some Hindi

Maybe there is something to be said for a film that is intermittently funny but tells an ordinary story in an otherwise ordinary fashion, making it hard to remember what it was about five minutes after stepping out of the hall. Whatever that something is, I will try to find it as I write this review of Children’s Park.

Director Shafi and writer Raffi’s Children’s Park is centred around three crooks, a get-rich-quick scheme involving an orphanage and the old man who once ran it. The dubious trio’s team-up occurs when Rishi’s late father ignores his son in his will and leaves a bulk of his wealth to this home for the parentless called Children’s Park. Through a series of circumstances, some of their making and some not, Rishi (played by actor Dhruvan), his best friend Jerry (Vishnu Unnikrishnan) and the small-time politician’s aide Lenin Adimala (Sharafudheen) end up running the place.

You know from the word go that the threesome will ultimately be reformed by their new-found love for the children. That in itself is no reason to write off the film, because sometimes what comes between a beginning and a predictable finale can be rewarding enough. Children’s Park has its moments, all of them pivoted on humour and the comic timing of Unnikrishnan and Sharafudheen, but these comedic patches and dialogues are not sufficient compensation for the largely hackneyed nature of the narrative.

For a start, the film’s writer treats the children like   background scenery throughout until they become crucial in the closing fight scenes. Before that happens, there is absolutely nothing to remember them by – no conversations, no effort at characterisation, nothing. This is contrary to the expectations set up by the really loooong opening song played entirely over visuals of children.

Mention of that number brings to mind Children’s Park’s odd attitude to language. The song is in Hindi, there are several extended, important scenes featuring a gangster named Muthupaandi who converses with his gang only in Tamil, and when the children speak in the end they too speak in Tamil – neither the song, nor these verbal exchanges are subtitled, which means a viewer of this film will fully understand it only if they are proficient in three languages. If the producers are not interested in attracting a non-Malayalam-speaking audience with English subtitles, that is their choice, but at the very least there should have been Malayalam subtitles for the Hindi and Tamil portions out of consideration for the primary target audience (meaning: Malayalam speakers) who spent money on tickets for what we were told is a Malayalam film.

 

The women of Children’s Park are only slightly less showpiece-like than the children. Their sole purpose in the plot is to give the male leads one good-looking female human each to fall in love with. 

All the fun in the film is to be had from the comicality of Jerry, Lenin and the artistes playing them. Vishnu Unnikrishnan took centre stage as an actor with Kattappanayile Rithwik Roshan in 2016 and is an excellent comic. Sharafudheen has a very likeable personality.

Rishi is played by Dhruvan, the least charismatic, least interesting of the three actors, and frankly I think it is a measure of Kerala’s white skin obsession that he gets described as a “glamour boy” by another character. Dhruvan first drew attention in a terribly amateurish film called Queen (2018) that felt and looked like something kindergarten children might create. In terms of production quality and writing, Children’s Park is a big step up from Queen but Dhruvan fails to add any spark whatsoever either to Rishi or the film.

That said, even Unnikrishnan and Sharafudheen can carry Children’s Park only so far and no further. The often entertaining Hareesh Kanaran plays the cook at the orphanage, but the humour developed around him is too juvenile and the actor himself, perhaps because of that, is off colour.

There is a running joke throughout Children’s Park revolving around two gluttons who run a dhaba. It works only once in the film, and that is in the way their food obsession is woven into the climax, but for the rest it is just boringly repetitive. The fact that it does click in that solitary instance is a reminder of Shafi’s comic potential. But as with his last film Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadha (2018), that potential remains unfulfilled here in Children’s Park because he is just not trying enough and seems satisfied with rolling out cliché after cliché such as that ho-hum Me Too wisecrack and the mindless placement of pretty women as props. In earlier works such as his 2002 blockbuster Kalyanaraman, at least he served up enough laugh-out-loud moments of nonsense to tide over the episodic plotline and clichés. That film may have been loud and garish, but at least we got to giggle over nutty lines like “Thalararuthe Ramankutty, thalararuthe”.

To be fair to Children’s Park, it is better than Oru Pazhaya Bomb Kadha. The occasional humour, Sharafudheen and Unnikrishnan are its saving graces (though I must say I am already tired of the way the latter’s characters keep dissing his own looks), but even they cannot change Children’s Park’s overall impact as an unremarkable, unmemorable film.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	164 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/childrens-park-movie-review-occasional-humour-and-sharafudheen-save-a-largely-non-descript-orphanage-saga-6823011.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/childrensparkmovieofficial/