Big Brother

When you see big names in the industry collaborating for a movie that has zero appreciable qualities, a sense of anger kicks in and Big Brother from director Siddique starring Mohanlal is one movie like that. Following the mold of the humble hero with a lesser-known past, Big Brother is mocking the audience throughout its runtime by exhibiting mediocrity. Even Mohanlal is visibly clueless about how to portray that character.

Sachidanandan has come out after serving a double life sentence in jail. His younger brother was the one who took the initiative to get him out of there. But things weren’t smooth as this brother got attacked by goons which forced Sachi to get back in the field. Sachi’s effort to save his brother and find that mysterious person who was organizing all these crimes is the basic story of Big Brother.

The one question everyone would possibly ask director Siddique after the movie would be whether he has stopped watching movies in the last decade. Over the top and outlandish characterizations, twists and turns that are visible from miles away, horrible romantic tracks, and outdated formulas of heroics and to make it worse, the movie’s length is 164 minutes. Once upon a time when Siddique and Lal were together, their movies had nuances and detailing which made almost all their characters so memorable. But after going solo, both of them forgot about their uniqueness and what we got to see was mostly superficial stuff from both. Siddique was the one who went after scale and it is so saddening to see him struggling miserably to create an action film. We are shown the teenage version of Sachidanandan being sent to jail, and the exotic production design of that jail room will easily get the Golden Raspberry award for 2020. That’s the level of seriousness that has gone into the making of this movie.

Mohanlal is clueless here. He is either overly naive as someone who has no exposure to the outer world or he is in that neutral zone. One punch dialogue you see in the trailer comes out of nowhere making me almost feel that Siddique added it simply for a slow-motion moment in the film. Arbaaz Khan is playing a character that has very less screen time and you will know where his character is heading very soon into the movie. Bibin George dubbing for Sarjano Khalid can’t reduce the mediocrity in his performance. Siddique has cast people like Anoop Menon, Honey Rose, etc in characters he doesn’t know what to do with. Vishnu Unnikrishnan, Irshad, and Tini Tom are the sidekicks. The female lead Mrinaa Menon lacks expressions and that pairing was seriously awkward. And the duo and the song reminded me of the Vennilave song from Sagar Alias Jacky.

Cinematic liberty helps filmmakers hugely in creating commercial potboilers. But you have to do it with conviction to make the audience buy that. Siddique is interested only in the broad strokes of storytelling. The script is so stupid that towards the end when the movie tries to reveal the antagonist, we will be like “wasn’t it already revealed?” The movie lingers around pointless scenes and songs for far too long and that’s a serious problem for a 164 minutes long movie. The characters here are severely underdeveloped and this movie will surely get spoofed in social media later on for its idiotic logic in many areas. Jithu Damodar’s cinematography is average and the editing messes up the movie at many places. The action choreography was also poor and some of the action sequences were forcefully included. The songs by Deepak Dev had a catchy vibe but sadly the placement of songs in this movie never blended smoothly with the narrative. 

Big Brother offers only boredom. This is a movie where you won’t even feel that it was a nice thought that got badly executed. A man who has an issue with facing the public after serving a 24-year long jail term is an interesting concept and sadly Big Brother uses that track only for stupid jokes and cheesy sentiments. The rest of it and most of it is the same old bomb story. In the climax, an explosion happens after multiple miniature cars with time bombs attached to them go off and Mohanlal jumping out from concrete debris created by the blast to hit the villain made me wonder whether this movie was initially planned in Tamil or Telugu with Rajinikanth or Balakrishna as the hero.

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