Of The People Malayalam Movie
Jayaraj, who had created waves with For the People, disappoints us greatly with Of the People, the third film in the sequel. The only saving grace is that the film turns out to be better than the second part, the entirely insufferable By the People.
Of the People, produced by Jayaraj himself under the banner of New Generation Cinema, would ironically disappoint and even confuse the new generation. The film takes off from where For the People and By the People had rounded off. Of the four young crusaders in For the People who took up arms to fight injustice, only three remain, with one (played by Bharath) being dead. The three (played by Arun, Arjun and Padmakumar) are released from jail.
Remembering the advice given by their elders, these three young rebels decide not to continue with their crusading activities. They get admitted to the very same college in which they had studied earlier. They even deliberately refrain from reacting when they are rounded off by goons. But as days go by, they find it difficult to restrain the urge to react to injustice, corruption and atrocities. They decide to do what they can.
They begin a website called ofthepeople.com and based on e-mails from the public, start hitting hard against corruption and injustice, eliminating wrongdoers in the process. After deciding their targets and making out plans, they, dressed in Che Guevera like outfits, set off on bikes to carry out their mission.
In the meantime, the State Chief Minister (Nedumbram Gopi), under pressure from all quarters, asks a daring young police Officer Harishankar (Harshan) to tackle the case and nab the 'Of the People' gang. But Harishankar, who is a righteous guy, takes a U-turn and things take a twist from here.
The main problem with the film seems to be that Jayaraj, one of the most enterprising directors in Malayalam, seems to have done it in a rather disinterested manner. While each frame of For the People shows that the director has put his heart and soul into the making of the film, the shots in By the People and Of the People seem to betray a lack of any such wholehearted involvement. Maybe the director was carried away by the success of the first film and believed that the subsequent films in the series would follow suit. This over-confidence seems to have done harm to the film.
The debutante script-writer Sreekumar Shreyas should have given more attention to details while penning the script. As for the dialogues in English, they sometimes seem to have been put there deliberately and are delivered rather awkwardly. Some of the scenes in the film are executed in the most boring manner and also acted out very indifferently.
The performance of the lead actors Arun, Arjun and Padmakumar is just so so. They seem to have lost the energy and zest that was there when they did For the People. Debutante Harshan as Harishankar too is just passable. The new heroine Devipriya as television reporter Nancy fails to impress. The songs are just OK and won't make the kind of impression that the songs of For the People had made.
In total Of the People leaves much to be desired and could very well be called a wasted effort. But as said earlier, there is solace in the thought that the film is somehow better than By the People.
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