'Bhoopadatthil Illatha Oridam' has a story that lacks the variability, polish or good humor to pull it off. This flat, sober and unconvincing melodrama almost seems like an endurance test that shows no signs of ending.
They tell us that there is a place called Vattanathra which is simply not there on any map, in a film that should simply not have been made. It is at a local school at Vattanathra that Madhavan Kutty (Sreenivasan) works as a teacher, far away from his home. When a robbery occurs at a jewelry shop near his place, Madhavan Kutty is summoned by the local police inspector (Innocent) and Panchayat President (Nedumudi Venu) to see if he would testify in a court as having seen a crime that he had not witnessed.
This man, believe it or faint, is a school teacher, and he flees the place, due to the fear that he might have to testify. The basic characterization in the film is faulty, in that none of the individual characters are chalked out precisely. So we have the teacher Madhavan Kutty, with barely any shots of the teacher in a school, a sub-inspector with such moronic qualities that best suit an imbecile, and a Panchayat President who overdoes things to such an extent that he almost even pawns his own wife.
As for the story, it makes us believe that there is a mystery hovering around somewhere initially. Even the not-so-naive viewer wouldn't have a clue as to what has struck their heads when post-interval the film concerns itself with a rape. Nothing is mentioned of the initial robbery ever again, and attempts are made to further build up some more suspense regarding the new incident.
Here is a man who stays away from home, and who doesn't seem to have heard of a gadget called the mobile phone. Madhavan Kutty rings up his wife from a local telephone booth, and I pacified myself with the thought that perhaps this was a place where the mobile phone invention was still unheard of. Until I saw the sub-inspector yapping away into his own perky little handset.
The few and far-in-between jokes are quite an insult to the intelligence. There is for instance this supposedly funny incident at the police station, where the constable standing beside the sub-inspector calls the senior officer on the landline and the two start chatting to each other through their respective phones. Hilarity is certainly not the achieved result.
I couldn't make head or tail as to where this entire film is headed, and laughed my guts out on hearing a fellow spectator comment that he shouldn't have left his helmet back home, since the urge to pull out one's hair seems to be getting stronger by the minute. It's unbelievable, that Sreenivasan is a part of this huge mess, and so are actors like Rajasree Nair, Nivin Pauly and Iniya.
You might be just wondering if this review has turned out to be quite hazy when it comes to the story of the film. Watch the film yourself at your own risk, and you would see how vaguer it could all get.