Wednesday 27 July 2011

Collector

2011 by Anil C Menon - Malayalam

Sometime in 90's, Ranji Panicker with his fire sprouting scripts, set the trend in Malayalam for a kind of political movies in which a police officer or a district collector would play the angry man for the common man. In fact, for about a decade we had so many of these films, all the super stars playing this kind of a cop or bureaucrat in their own and many of these films meant guaranteed success at least in the first half of the decade, as they managed to mix contemporary politics with a dream hero. For the last couple of years, there were only a few of these kind of movies and now there is yet again one of this genre.

A district collector goes out of the way to fight the real estate mafia in Kochi city, who are backed by strong political personalities. 

Somebody who is not from Kochi, if they see 10 contemporary Malayalam movies, might easily consider Kochi as a very dangerous city where every second person might be from some mafia. It is strange how our cinema picked up Kochi for this. True, 4/5 years back there were many incidents with the mafia world in the city, which made life look dangerous. But then there was a period of strong Police petrols and Kochi city looks quite safe for me. There is lot of Police presence even in the middle of night, at least in the heart of city as this is where I am around with my life, and I find it quite allright. Just wish, if Kochi was clean like it used to be in the 80's and beginning of 90's.

So, this movie makes Kochi look like another dreadful mafia city and as a movie it is quite difficult to complete. The acting of most supporting staff, especially the actress who played Revathy, Assistant Commissioner of Police, was horrible that it gave chances for the crowd to laugh out loud at times. And almost all characters are very similar to the ones from the past movies that we know exactly how all of them would be as the movie goes on.

Sure, it does have some messages here and there about protecting the city and its dependants from the land mafia and construction spree and all, but it is a terrible effort as a movie. At many parts it looked like the print was resting in its box, without any silica gel to fight humidity, for long time. I am not really sure if it is a new movie. At the same time it has scenes which tells the viewer that it was shot only in the recent past.

Forgettable in all ways.