Pretham Malayalam Movie
The trailer was meh, but somehow to my surprise, the initial portions of Renjith Shankar's "Pretham" set things rollicking. I particularly enjoyed a bit where Govind Padmasurya's character plays a practical joke on his mates - Aju Varghese, Sharafudheen - giving them and the audience, the impression of a house falling down at night.
Paranormal activity? Well, you guessed it right. What a blessed relief is laughter! Pity then that the movie doesn't stay afloat on the same tone throughout. Welcome to the genre: horror-comedy; the kind of cinema where even the safest car in the world would lose its steering and wheels, on the safest of roads.
Aju Varghese, Sharafudheen, and Govind Padmasuriya play three carefree adults in the film, who run a beach-side resort somewhere in Kerala. The plot kicks in when the trio starts to experience the presence of a ghost in the house. A mentalist named John Don Bosco (Jayasurya) is roped in to get to the bottom of things. Presumably, the ghost he is conjuring up here is a damsel in distress - one who keeps sending signals through mobiles and laptops for a change.
Seeing how Shankar stages this ho-hum plot niftily, with dizzying camera work, and clever little special effects; it's hard to believe that he's the same man who wrote that ingenious 'Nizhalukal' back in 2000. This movie neither has the chills, nor the thrills of Nizhalukal. And what is disappointing is not the final outcome, but the manner in which the director put an end to this "horror-comedy" farce.
This is a case of overstuffing a plot with too much content. Not that it tries to do too many things in terms of acting, but plotting. Jayasurya is literally wasted in the role of a mentalist. The actor, bald haired, wearing spectacles and sporting a thick black beard; appears to be mellowed down by a notch, playing especially, the lead in a Ranjith Shankar movie. Here is a guy who acts and talks as if he were a sleuth or something, taken straight out of Arthur Conan Doyle's coffer. Do policemen hire the services of psychological experts to solve whodunits, just like that? Unless of course, it's Sherlock Holmes we are talking about.
If it weren't for Aju Varghese and Sharafudheen chipping in with wisecracking one-liners here and there, one would have fancied shooting oneself in the foot, with a quarter of an hour still left to go. Govind Padmasuriya does nothing except show his face here and there, and comes up with a meek show. I would have preferred Soubin in the role of Dharmajan, and still can't fathom as to how our industry squanders the talent that Hareesh Peradi really is!
None of these actors really make the movie work. How fast can you drive a car forward, if the wheels keep falling off like this? Can you picture Charlie Chaplin, down on one knee, losing the plot to one of his ad-lib stand-up comedies? Unless of course, you are the mentalist that Jayasurya plays here, I doubt you can.
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