The protagonist of debut director Leo Thaddeos’s Oru Cinemakkaaran, Alby (Vineeth Sreenivasan) is an assistant director striving to make his dream directorial debut. His father, played by Renji Panikker, is a Jacobite priest, always seen with a posse of junior priests. The significance of these non-mainstream career choices of the characters, though, is ambiguous at best.
The film doesn’t belong to the genre of meta-cinema, although it pretends to be one in the last sequence – and fails. If the young man was a pizza delivery boy and his father, a bank clerk, the film would still be the same. Even better, it would have spared the audience the much-hackneyed trope – struggles of an aspiring filmmaker – that occupies the most of the film.
Alby is cash-strapped, and has been waiting forever for a particular producer to listen to his script. It is not clear why he doesn’t approach another producer when the former snubs him many times. He is in love with a sprightly girl, Saira (Rejisha Vijayan) from a rich household. When friends, relatives and neighbours nag Alby with questions like, “will you ever make a film?”, Saira defends him with all her might, trusting in his ability completely.
Thaddeos’s film starts off as a nondescript comic entertainer woven around this couple, but soon, the film shifts into crime-drama mode, with a murder and cover-up at its heart. Alby’s neighbour, Sudhi (Vijay Babu) is dead, apparently after a violent scuffle he’d had with Alby inside his apartment. When his corpse – which Alby had dumped in an abandoned plot – is discovered, all hell breaks loose. The crime investigation is led by a senior police officer who has a peculiar habit of whistling and flirting with his wife on phone while he is inspecting the murder spot. The hip and energetic background score tries to say that we are witnessing something very intelligent and cool, but it turns out that the score is wrong.
Oru Cinemakkaran is an unintelligent crime drama with loop holes aplenty. Consider this: A corpse is found in an unused compound in the middle of the city. For years, commercial cinema has been teaching us that in such cases, before you do anything, you look for tyre marks in and around the site. In Thaddeos’s film, this idea dawns on the investigative officer only in the post-interval half. This lax in story-telling shouldn’t come as a surprise because this is a film which lacks imagination, and is ridden with cliches. The jokes aren’t funny enough, and situations do not offer anything new or interesting.
Perhaps, the sole impressive part of the story is how Alby, a gentleman with an impeccable moral profile, coolly resorts to stealing and murdering when a financial crisis hits. Vineeth Srinivasan played a similar character in his acting debt, Cycle. Unfortunately, his acting skill doesn’t seem to have undergone any improvement from those days. He has a stiff and clumsy body language, and he still uses his famous side-way glance to express fear and mental trauma. Meanwhile, his co-star Rejisha is a fine natural talent. She acts like she has always known the character she is portraying. With her on the screen, it is easier to pretend that Vineeth doesn’t exist.
Recommended
Oru Cinemakkaran is the latest entrant to the list of unexceptional youth-oriented films that Mollywood has been churning out. They come wrapped in a progressive, optimistic and funny air, but in no time, the hollowness of the film comes to light. They are made with a lot of ambition, but with little grip over the medium. The narration lacks clarity, and the plot is inane and forgettable. Once in a while, these films feature an actor or a technician worth raving about, and in the case of Oru Cinemakkaran, it is Rejisha Vijayan.
*****
The Oru Cinemakkaran review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.