Welcome to Central Jail Malayalam Movie

Feature Film | 2016 | Action, Comedy, Romantic, Family Drama
Critics:
Audience:
A flopping chaos of a movie that's an unintentional joke by itself, 'Welcome to Central Jail' is the kind of movie that needs to be straightway thrashed.
Sep 12, 2016 By Veeyen


Half way through a fight sequence at an ice cream shop in 'Welcome to Central Jail', you almost make up your mind to get up and leave, and then stay put telling yourself that it's not even the half way point as yet. You realize that you have made a real bad decision a couple of minutes later, when the ice cream stall owner walks around with a couple of cones fixed on his forehead.


Slapstick earns for itself a bad name in 'Welcome to Central Jail', the latest Dileep outing directed by Sundar Dass, the film maker who gifted us with 'Sallapam', a couple of decades back. Scripted by Benny P Nayarambalam, 'Welcome to Central Jail' gets shortlisted for the Year's nastiest film disaster in no time.



Unnikuttan (Dileep), born to a woman prisoner in the Central Jail, develops an affinity for the place even after turning an adult. He gets himself involved in petty crimes and comes back to the jail time and again, confessing that the prison is more like home to him. Once out on parole, he meets Radhika (Vedhika), a photographer who finds herself in a mess when a photo shoot inadvertently captures a crime.


I am not really hunting for some logic in a junkyard as this, but when you get to see the prison officers anxiously trying to make the love story work, you start wishing for the sky to fall down. And when a police officer comments that the inmates have transformed the prison into a playschool, you nod your heads in disagreement. For one, kids are tons more intelligent, and two, this scenario is much, much worse.


Despite the expectations regarding the film being zilch, there is nothing that the film does to surpass them. It's true that there aren't any opportunities lying around for the film to work wonders, and with a non-existent storyline as the one in question, there is only this much that the makers can aspire to do.


The very first song in the film, (after a title song, that is) is one that would have you clutching on to your seats, lest you end up banging your head down on your knees in disgust. Everything about it is unbelievably crass, and thankfully the couple of songs that follow aren't as bad. And there are the jokes that clearly centre around parts of the human anatomy and which guarantee anything but laughter.


There is this highly theatrical climax that makes you wonder if you had been watching some other film for the last couple of hours, and the epilogue makes up for the slight diversion in tenor, by hastily reverting to the absurd tone.


It's high time Dileep realized that the festival crowd does not equate to a tolerant crowd that would lap up any nonsense in the name of entertainment. There has been a steady decline over the years for cinematic scrap as this, and 'Welcome to Central Jail' touches an all time low on that front. I would rather not talk about Dileep's performance in the film, nor of the supporting cast, since it's all best seen and left as a bad joke.


I truly hope for Dileep's sake, that he doesn't squander away all the good will that he has earned over the years, by being a part of a bawdy comedy as 'Welcome to Central Jail'. A flopping chaos of a movie that's an unintentional joke by itself, 'Welcome to Central Jail' is the kind of movie that needs to be straightway thrashed.


Veeyen

   

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