By now, it's an undeniable fact that the Dileep brand has grown to be the most salable entertainment product in the Malayalam entertainment market. The latest product of this brand is no different. Being so, it requires no evaluation of its aesthetic or artistic merits. Yet this edition may face the wrath of even the hardcore Dileep fans.
The film directed by Joshiy holds neither a story that's worth telling nor any enriching moments. The events, situations, plots and schemes are all things of the past which had been conjured a hundred times in films of various languages.
Madhavan Mahadevan (Dileep) in his journey to re-stabilise the life of his bereaved sister-in-law and niece after the death of his elder brother Sudhakaran (Ganesh Kumar) chances upon glimpses of truth behind the death of his brother. Madhavan's journey to find the truth leads him from one bad situation to another. Madhavan confronts his lady love Manimekhala (Lakshmi Menon) early on and eventually comes across the perpetrators of the crime of which his brother was a victim.
The elaborate star cast has show-cased the characters with precision and élan. But the vitality of collective endeavour seeps through the staleness of storyline and cavities in rationale behind situations. The humourous scenes which were forced out of unwarranted situations are out of place. The extremely artificial dialogues and reaction render the characters horribly weak and some times push them overboard to the point of comicality.
Performances of Shammi Thilakan as CI Jeevan, Babu Namboothiri as Sree Rama Krishnamoorthy, Devan as Dr Philip Mathew, Joy Mathew as John and Mithun Ramesh as Joby are persevering. However, they fail to create an impact of any kind and you sit glued to the screen like a senseless spectator.
Slapstick comic sequences executed by Kalabhavan Shajon eject some kind of irksome laughter and there are characters who appear and vanish without any reason in particular. For example Divakarettan (Siddique) appears in a cameo serving no purpose at all.
If comedy has been his USP so far, Dileep has this time entered a serious domain. However, a plot based on murder-vengeance-gangwar saga, 'Avatharam' pitches a bit on humour here and some emotional drama there and finally ends up a trash of overused schemes and sequences. The hard fact is that the comic scenes are tragedies and serious scenes are comedies.
Technically, the film is somewhere close to meticulousness. The areas of cinematography and art direction have been burnished exceedingly well. Music by Deepak Dev is aslo refreshing. Editing makes the flow seamless.
Stuffed with violence and bloodshed, the film doesn't offer anything fresh except the concept of a gangsters' family which consists of members from grandmother to grand children pitted in the environs of gang wars. Of course there's also some novelty in the name of the heroine-Manimekhala.
It seems that the crew has decided to limit the creative ingenuity to flourish for the time being and let the film enthusiasts binge on crime thriller for a change. But missed out on the cardinal point that blood, knives and crimes are not the only factors which shape a crime thriller!