Abrid Shine's fresh release The Kung Fu Master ends with the tagline -- Revenge is a dish best served cold. But then the problem with the dish is that it's half-baked.
After cricket, cops and campus, Shine has chosen kung fu as the key around which storytelling revolves.
It could well be the first Malayalam film to have explored so much the possibilities of the martial art to tell an ordinary tale of revenge.
The Kung Fu Master seems to have been triggered by the director's passion to unleash a martial arts thriller, a genre that has many cult classics in world cinema.
In his haste to attempt something novel, the filmmaker seems to have taken the easiest route of depending on a simple and plain storyline.
The film revolves around the family of Rishi Ram (Jiji Scaria), a 36-year-old kung fu master settled in Uttrakhand.
His happy and peaceful family life takes a hit when he turns a police informer against Lewis Antony, who heads a criminal gang.
What happens next is everyone's guess.
In executing the run-of-the-mill revenge drama, Shine wields his camera to capture the beauty of the Himalayas and its valleys in abundance.
His actors -- Jiji, Neetha Pillai and Sanoop Dinesh -- display some exceptional kinetic skills as their characters vent out their anger.
Their movements are so fast that the rest of the sequences fail to match their speed.
Except for the boldness to experiment in choice of themes, The Kung Fu Master is neither above nor below a notch in Abrid's career graph.
