MALABAAR POLICE

A movie review by Balaji Balasubramaniam

Cast:	Satyaraj, Kushboo, Abbas, Mumtaj, Koundamani, Vijayakumar, Sivakumar, Jaiganesh, Anandraj, Vinu Chakravarthy
Music:	S.A.Rajkumar
Direction:	P.Vasu

A year ago, there was a movie called Unmai, dubbed from Malayalam, where Mammootty played a police officer investigating the assassination of the Chief Minister. With credible suspense and a taut storyline, it showed exactly how a murder-mystery should be filmed. With this similarly themed movie, P.Vasu delivers a lesson on how a murder-mystery should not be made.

The movie begins promisingly enough with the murder of an old man (who we soon learn is a prominent Kerala minister). The murder is witnessed by Raja(Abbas) and Julie(Mumtaj), a couple of lovers eloping from their village. They, followed by the murderer, flee to Chennai. Chinnasamy(Satyaraj), whose ancestors hail from TamilNadu, is a member of the Kerala Police. He arrives in Chennai with his wife Ammu(Kushboo), to investigate the murder. He soon has run-ins with two local bigwigs Sivasankaran(Jaiganesh) and Nagarajan(Sivakumar).

Raja and Julie are separated and Julie ends up as a maid in Chinnasamy's house (He doesn't know her since he has a picture of Raja only. Julie's father is supposed to have burnt ALL pictures of his daughter the moment she ran away!) while Raja finds refuge with a couple who also got married in the face of stiff opposition from the girl's millionaire father. Chinnasamy apprehends Raja who identifies Varadappan(Anandraj) as the murderer but Varadappan is killed before he has a chance to reveal the real bad guy - the man who asked him to kill the minister. After a little digging around, Chinnasamy identifies the real villain.

P.Vasu likes to make movies overflowing with sentiments. He has shown that amply in his movies - from the most successful, Chinna Thambi, to the most recent, Ponnu Veettukkaaran. Though he has been sporadically successful with his style of film-making, he is a complete misfit as the director for a whodunnit. The sentiments (Kushboo is unable to beget a child, Satyaraj starts bleeding from his ear, etc.) just serve to divert our interest away from the murder itself and irreparably slow down the pace. The same thing applies to Abbas and Mumtaj. While they start out as being key to the whole murder they soon turn into just unnecessary baggage, searching for each other and bursting into duets at inappropriate times. The direction itself smacks of amateurishness and it is painfully obvious that the red herrings thrown in to dupe the viewer are exactly that.

Another basic problem with the movie is that Satyaraj's character just doesn't seem too clever. Most things he finds out happen purely by coincidence or luck and since the identity of the villain is obvious to the viewer within a few reels, the final talkathon where he reveals who the villain is, turns out to be an anti-climax. There was exactly one point during the whole revelation(when he reveals the point at which he started suspecting the villain) when I was genuinely surprised by his deduction. A stong motive might have partially rescued the movie. The motive in Unmai was an unexpected twist that took me completely by surprise and even in Gurupaarvai, which too was a thriller with lots of sentiments, the motive of the protagonist was both strong enough and credible but here the motive of the murder turns out to be weak.

Satyaraj huffs and puffs his way through the role launching into frequent, irritating diatribes against injustices meted out to the police. But his Malayalam is tolerable. Wish someone would come up with a Vedham Pudhidhu or even a Walter Vetrivel to utilise his vast talent. Kushboo is wasted in a role designed purely to lure the womenfolk into the theatre. Abbas has another sorry role after Padaiyappaa while its not much of a step-up for Mumtaj after Monisha En Monalisa. I don't remember the last time Sivakumar had such a small fraction of the screen time. Koundamani's character is another needless one but he has a field day with the Malayalam accent put on by Satyaraj, adding one more to the long and fruitful association between the two.