Vishal Menon

Sajeev Pazhoor, the first-time director of Enna Vilai, is no ordinary writer. He’s written the new-age Malayalam classic Thondimuthalum Drikshakshiyum and the directors who have worked on Sajeev’s scripts include Dileesh Pothan, G Prajith (the director of Oru Vadakkan Selfie) and the master Shaji N Karun. Sajeev has also made dozens of documentaries and short films before turning director with Enna Vilai, a Tamil drama set in Rameshwaram. What shines through, even at a premise level, is this writer’s mind and a short story-like quality that could have been made into a better film.

In a film titled Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar (prima facie culprits), you’d wonder why its writers spend so much time introducing the police officers. When we first meet Aleena (Parvathy), we’re told that she has lost her husband and that she’s being given his job in the police force on compassionate grounds. She has a baby girl, and it appears that she has no one else to live for except her daughter. In the new station where she takes charge, we also meet Divya (Unnimaya), a senior constable who hasn’t yet been able to conceive a child despite multiple attempts. As for Dasan (Siddharth Bharathan) and Sreenath (Mathew), both of them are on the cusp of starting their respective lives after years of waiting. Everything about these officers and their police station spells out their ordinariness. We catch them picking fights with the egoistic senior officer, and we see them going through their mundane duties without the righteousness of the kind police officers movies are made with. But this is only until these fallible officers collude to make a mistake that’s bigger than all of them. By this point, though, these four have become very real people in our minds, and even their wrongs begin to look a lot like muddy truths to us.

The first half of Sardar 2 may seem familiar, but at least it commits to the kind of spy thriller it wants to be. There’s a lofty idea in there about a Japanese-made bioweapon that’s being kept secret by the Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and there’s a thrilling flashback that gives you the origins of how this weapon got to India in the first place. Set predominantly in the 1980s, the film sees Bose (Karthi), or Sardar, navigating the complexities of this international mission, and we also get a series of Mission: Impossible-style action set pieces that cover everything from the back of an airplane to the front of a Japanese bullet train.

The first half of Sardar 2 may seem familiar, but at least it commits to the kind of spy thriller it wants to be. There’s a lofty idea in there about a Japanese-made bioweapon that’s being kept secret by the Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and there’s a thrilling flashback that gives you the origins of how this weapon got to India in the first place. Set predominantly in the 1980s, the film sees Bose (Karthi), or Sardar, navigating the complexities of this international mission, and we also get a series of Mission: Impossible-style action set pieces that cover everything from the back of an airplane to the front of a Japanese bullet train. Unlike PS Mithran’s earlier films, which worked best as entertainingly told message movies, there’s a sincere effort that’s gone into developing Bose’s character into a genuinely complex human being. The film makes the case for this early on when the bad guys threaten a RAW agent by taking his daughter hostage. But the threat here is not that they would kill the little girl if her father refuses to divulge sensitive information. Instead, they claim they will use the girl as a detonator to set off a mass shooting that would affect her mental health later on.

Nahas Hidhayath, both writer and director of I’m Game, does something clever by setting his second film in Hyderabad. When looked at purely as a business proposition, it makes sense given the stardom Dulquer Salmaan enjoys in the two Telugu-speaking states. From a narrative lens, the Hyderabad setting complements the film’s larger-than-life aspirations and the audacity with which it navigates a particularly improbable plotline. But instead of settling for this alien setting alone, it adds Tamil characters to its core. The film doesn’t even make a big deal of this, choosing instead to play this lack of specificity as something very natural to the film’s urban setting. What these choices do is prepare us for a film that feels like it was not made in Malayalam. But there are advantages to this too. Instead of looking for realism or the crutch of logic to enter its crazy world, we’re already there about 10 minutes into the film. This creates a distance, as though this story is happening somewhere else, but it also sets the stage for the film to take a wild swing at almost anything, as long as it entertains.

There’s a forgotten brand of humour that works really well for the most part in Vishnu Edavan’s Hi. Reminding one of the loud, but likeable comedies from the ’90s made by directors like Ezhil and Sundar C, the intentional old-schoolness of Hi has a way of surprising you with its silliness. It doesn’t even attempt to play it safe or try the logical approach. If there’s a joke to be milked, the film will do anything, even if means hitting someone on the head with a pole. It’s desperate and immatur, but oftentimes also feels oddly sincere.

To call Once More an intense love story would be to reduce it to just one aspect that make this film wonderfully frustrating. Instead, I’d prefer to look at this story of a man named Raghuvaran (Arjun Das) as something of a cruel whodunnit. I call it that because the Raghu we first meet can barely be called a person who is well and alive. He’s a corpse, that’s just about capable of walking and talking. When we see him in constant conversation with both a priest as well as a psychiatrist, we see him grappling with spirituality and/or science to bring him alive. Instead of saying ‘Raghu is…’, the film trains you to say ‘Raghu was…’

Director Vysakh has made some of Malayalam cinema’s biggest blockbusters, but he still doesn’t have a clue about how to handle romance. In a fairly straightforward first half hour of the film, you’d expect to understand the Ali family’s hierarchy and criminal legacy; Vysakh forces a “cute” love story between Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Aamir Ali and a girl named Fiza. There’s some background here about Aamir’s ailing grandpa and how he wants to see him get married as his dying wish, but you can smell the fluff from miles away.