A feature-length no-smoking PSA. The amount of preachiness and the way everything is connected to the central theme feels so over the top and yet by the end, it feels like the least of all the problems with the film. The visual grammar of the movie is still a decade ago when South Indian films were successfully experimenting with new genres and little technical missteps were forgiven. I haven't seen his previous films but Pawan Kumar clearly has an issue with directing in Malayalam. His lack of knowledge of the language is pretty obvious in the dialogues and the way the actors are directed. Some of the scenes felt like the sketches my friends used to do in college where they don't know what to do with their bodies after the dialogue is said. Even Fahadh couldn't do anything with this stuff but at the same time, Roshan did terrific despite these circumstances where almost everyone else was terrible.
Corporate greed and lack of ethics are not at all just tied to a single industry like the makers may be thinking to make a movie in this way. Most people are also much more intelligent and knowledgeable about the effects of tobacco and related products than the movie gives them credit for even if there would always be a percentage who'd be always ignorant.
There were so many things in the movie that were so forced, so hammy in the movie but the dumbest of them all should be how it showed that none of the employees or board members of a cigarette company smokes because they supposedly know the problems, first-hand. Are these guys serious? That too in a city like Bangalore?
Even though I've only smoked three times in the last three years, I felt like I should have a smoke to recover from this.
