Movie Review- Doubles (Malayalam)

I sat in the cinema hall determined to come up with anything positive about this still born child. Nevertheless to say I did pay extra bucks for the reservation. It would be bad for my ego to totally curse the director.

The past few weeks have been bad to me in terms of one bad movie after another. Today morning I had just wrapped up the third installment of Spiderman. I closed my laptop dumbfounded at the horror I just witnessed. I went out do some shopping when this idea struck me as I passed across the movie hall. Mammootty and Nadia Moithu were coming together after years. It is bound to be a good movie and I went ahead and booked the ticket.

Thanks to an unusual afternoon traffic block I reached the screening 10 minutes late only to find out that nothing significant did happen. During the first half interval I peered over my shoulder to check out how the fellow prisoners were faring. The crowd was too stunned to boo. They pensively looked down their watches. No one even got up to get the popcorns. Why to add up expenses on a doomed day? By the end of the show, there were smiles of relief on all faces.

The director had a fairly good seed for the story. It wasn’t run-of-the-mill and he could have turned things around. It seems he got a good financier too. It was evident in the well ensemble cast and out-of-town locale. The movie was well paced and I couldn’t find many wasted sequences or characters. Sohan Seenulal is a talented director.

Although the director walks away with most of the credits for a well made movie, he will have to content with major chunk of brickbats for the badly made ones. May be Sohan had to do with a poor and weak team behind the camera which ultimately led to the downfall of ‘Doubles’. Script writing did no justice in developing the story. The story should have progressed with the brother-sister relationship flowing as an undercurrent. Sadly the relationship was underplayed or overplayed and was totally lost out. The points where the twists and turns occurred in the script weren’t strong enough to convince.

Character development was also a big flaw in the movie. This again is a major flaw in almost every film today and lack of good writers can be attributed as a reason. Mammootty looked totally confused on the screen. The viewers sat more confused than him. The film can go down as one of the worst performances in his career. As if that was not enough sudden outbursts of anger from Nadia literally raised gasps of disbelief in the hall.

In short this movie was not meant for Mammootty-Nadia. Casting a 50+ year old pair as a 30+ pair of twins is not an ideal idea. Wrinkled skin on the neck exposed what the heavy makeup hid on the face. Even more, casting a 20 year old heroine opposite to Mammootty was another joke. Thankfully Mammootty didn’t add insult to injury with much romancing. I bet the villain must have been a financier or a friend of financier. He was very amateurish and was not suited at all except for the designer shirts he wore.

Coming to other technical aspects of the movie- the camera angles were very ordinary. When a film is shot in Pondicherry, there should have been some landscape visuals. Sadly every frame was done in interiors, totally wasting the money spent in going out-of-town. Lack of visionary was evident in lighting. The night sequences were too dark and we wished we carried a torch along. These are some basic things to be dealt in film making. Malayalam cinema has to badly deal with car chase sequences. The cars have become expensive, but chase sequences are from primitive era.

The worst part: As for the jokes, some internet jokes were copied and shot off at all the improper places. There are double meaning ones to tickle your cheap nerves. Somebody please kill Suraj. He is a curse to the Malayalam cinema. He is there in every movie, cracks the same stale jokes and get slapped in and around.

The only two songs in the film were totally unnecessary. In the first one the misfit villain suddenly bursts into a gypsy number with white skinned item girls. The second one was even more unnecessary with an out-of-job Kiran Rathore juggling her demographic curves.

Footnote: Mammootty is determined to make 2011 a bad year for him after a good 2010.