Although Vimaanam has been marketed as a biopic about a man who builds an ingenious airplane, it is actually a love story. And an unconvincing one at that. Director Pradeep Nair's amateur direction is evident in almost all sequences as even thespians like Alencier Lopez and Sudheer Karamana fail at pulling themselves together. The only thing that is appreciable in the film is Prithviraj's performance where he plays a half-deaf inventor with a dream to make and fly an airplane with his childhood sweetheart (done by Durga Krishna). Much like the airplanes in the film, it takes a lot of time for Vimaanam to take off, and actually come to the point. And this can be blamed on the long, very long takes at the start. However, even a tighter narrative would not do justice to the original story (based on real life, I hear) because there are gaps in the screenplay. Director-writer Nair gives more prominence to the romance here because while you can see and enjoy Prithviraj and Krishna's chemistry, the main topic of building an airplane is almost always peripheral. Not in one sequence do they get into the technical bits; HP and torque are mentioned once or twice by characters who look like they are sure they know nothing about them. There's a scene where all these characters dance to a hip number and at the end of the song, we see a finished model of an airplane. That is NOT how you make a film that is essentially about airplanes. Moreover, the love story that I am talking about is not the most entertaining either because of the anti-climactic, dull narrative (thanks also to the mediocre production). Apart from the hummable main theme and Prithviraj's presence, there's very little you get from Vimaanam, which is almost as substandard as Srikant Murali's 2017 film on the same topic, 'Aby'. TN.
