'Kandahar' (Malayalam, Action, 2011)
Director: Major Ravi
Cast: Mohanlal, Amitabh Bachchan, Ganesh Venkitaraman
Watch 'Kandahar' if you want to know what martyrdom is.
Any individual who is capable of sitting through the ludicrous two hours will finally achieve it for sure. Major Ravi's third outing with Major Mahadevan will give you the creeps if you dare to enter the theatre expecting a desi 'Air Force One'.
The over-hyped flick is all about a plane hijack bundled up into about 30 minutes post-interval. The storyline revolves around the highly principled Lokanath Sharma (Amitabh Bachchan) and his angry-youngman son Surya (Ganesh Venkitaraman), who is handpicked by Major Mahadevan (Mohanlal) to be an Army-man.
A mess of predictability and lack of precision, the script itself makes the major spoiler. A cock-eyed catalogue ridiculing the sensitive and the sensible, the film fails to stimulate the sentiments of patriotism and valour.
There is a parallel plot of another youth training to be a jihadi which reminds you of amateurish short films screened at schools against alcohol and drugs.
Anybody with a normal IQ will find the commando operation part silly if not farcical.
Major and his commandos enter the hijacked aircraft opening the cargo hold with the same ease of opening a cab door. There is no high-octane suspense or buildup, they announce they are commandos and unceremoniously gun down the baddies.
Then comes the most unpardonable climax you have ever seen. We are left to gape in disbelief as Major Mahadevan takes control from the injured pilot.
He listens to the dying pilot's instructions and voila: the aircraft bellylands to absolute safety.
Instead of adding to the suavity, Bachchan's elegant screen presences sticks out in the film and Lal is his usual natural self whenever he is not speaking Hindi. Ganesh Venkitaraman is an apology for an actor and, unlike Jeeva in 'Keerti Chakra', dies an inglorious death as if in a truck accident.
But this time the filmmaker's attempt at a sentimental holocaust misfires as we are unable to feel any emotion other than relief that finally the ordeal is over. Major Ravi who appears as Major Shiva shouts and shrieks at the highest decibel possible and we fear he will get an asthma attack next moment or blow off his vocal cords.
There are a couple of characters introduced for comic relief and a string of females who are forced upon the plot. There is Surya's girlfriend who is artificiality personified and then the blink and miss cameo of Sumalatha.
The two girls exclusively fitted into the plot for a bar dance, Geeta Vijayan who hardly has any line to speak and Ananya who keeps on staring, make the others. Though Lalitha's character is devised to create unlimited melodrama, she annoys the viewer in the very first scene with her lengthy rhetoric.
The technical part is equally disappointing with limp and exceedingly dull action choreography, glitchy dubbing, unbearable graphics and flat editing. We wish there are no more terrorist attacks in the country. More than patriotic feelings, we scare the prospect of it inspiring another movie from Major Ravi.