Careful review: A thriller with little logic

Film:  Careful
Genre: Thriller
Director:  V K Prakash
Cast:  Sandhya Raju, Vijay Babu, Joemol

Logic and commercial potboilers don’t exactly go together, at least in our  films. So, it is not really imperative that a thriller/ entertainer should, of all things, have reason. 
V K Prakash’s Careful too suffers from this ‘deficiency of logic’ and we wish it had been more convincing and sensible. Nonetheless Careful makes for a decent thriller, with a fair share of edge-of-the-seat moments. Loosely inspired by Kannada movie U-Turn, Careful has a debutante (dancer Sandhya Raju)as protagonist. Rachana is a trainee journalist at a newspaper. An under-performer, Rachana finds herself on the ‘to-be-sacked list’, and has to come up with a solid story if she wants to cling on to her job. 

That’s how Rachana decides to work on a ‘different angle’, with regard  to a road accident story. But, she soon is picked up by the police for a murder. From there on, Rachana’s life takes a U-turn.

The plot could be pretty novel for those who haven’t seen or heard about the Pawan Kumar-directed Kannada flick, and VKP has planted it to Kochi, giving it a local tang. Once the characters are established, Careful takes us directly into the plot and we are intrigued.  While we wait for the mystery to unfurl, things get murky. We learn about the ‘particular someone’ who triggers the murder spree, but, by then, logic gets thrown into the winds. 

VKP could have salvaged the situation at least in the Malayalam version, but opts to stick to its predecessor’s line and hits an easy conclusion. Despite that Careful does have its merits. There are some thrills, thanks to the sound effects and a relatively unpredictable narrative. Only that, for a  movie that advocates the cause of road safety, we wish the makers had shown a bit more sense. 

As for the cast, Sandhya Raju’s Malayalam debut could have been better. She barely emotes in some scenes, and we wonder why the director chose her in the first place. She cuts a rather unconvincing figure as a journalist and some of her ‘on-work acts’ are plain ridiculous. 

Joemol makes a comeback through  Careful, but she has little to do. So does Vijay Babu. But, the most unbearable of these elements is the melodrama in the climax.