The Last Two Days

SI: “We have the fingerprints of the suspects from that location. So what does that mean?”. Constable: “It means they were there.” Imagine being that invisible third person who is watching this kind of conversation (These are not the exact dialogues in the movie). Debutante Santhosh Lakshman’s The Last Two Days feels exactly like that. Made within the constraints of the Covid Protocol, this one just can’t attain the kind of seriousness it wants to achieve and ends up being this usual customized justice story where the “message” plays for the gallery without bothering about its implications.

Inspector Srikanth is in charge of a missing case of three men. The missing men had created a new political party and had plans to contest in the elections. However, just before the elections, these men went missing. There are speculations that they have been murdered, and the possibility of hiding to get some sympathy votes is also there. Srikanth is given the duty of finding a proper closure to this case and how he does that is what we see in the movie.

From the making of the movie, it’s very obvious that they had to do it all under the lockdown restrictions. The case investigation occurs mostly in a resort, with Srikanth analyzing official papers and talking to possible suspects and leads over the phone. But it’s not really the canvas that makes this movie look lame. The writing is so outdated that you feel like laughing at the dialogues. They are just following the existing stereotypes in character building, and there isn’t a moment in the movie that feels cinematically appealing. As a 20 minutes short film, this would have been a slightly more compelling idea.

Deepak Parambol is that typical young and focused police officer who is thinking hard to solve the mystery. I must say that he managed to make the “hard thinking” look serious on-screen. Then you have Nandan Unni, your cliched Kuttanpilla police, who has absolutely zero purposes in the movie. All his character has to do is finish the half-sentences of Parambol’s character. Aditi Ravi plays another pointless character for the sake of putting a female actor on the poster. Dharmajan Bolgatty, Major Ravi, Vineeth Mohan, and Surjith are the other faces here.

Santhosh Lakshman is trying to capitalize on the mob justice mentality. But he and co-writer Navaneeth Raghu doesn’t seem to have the patience to write something unique. They are playing with the tried and tested formulas of distractions in thrillers. When you are shooting within limitations, you need to be extra creative in writing, and here not even the basic excitement was there. A sequence in the movie shows the protest done by five students, and it looked so deserted. Someone like Jeo Baby smartly created a crowded wedding just using close-up shots and exemplary sound design in The Great Indian Kitchen. The sound design was also bizarre here. Deepak was typing on a laptop, and the keystrokes sounded like a desktop. The cuts are way too flashy, and the visuals were on the okay side.

The duration of the movie is only 1 hour and 14 minutes. And so, sitting through this movie isn’t really a struggle. But the film feels terribly bland, and I can’t even compare it with some movie to say that this one will work for you if you have liked that movie. The Last Two Days is a result of hasty screenwriting without giving much thought to the novelty of the idea.