Kochaal

Kochaal, the latest police investigation thriller, starring Krishna Shankar as the title character, is a thriller muddled in cliches. When the movie reaches its investigative bits in the last half of its run time, there is a bit of excitement on offer. But by the time it reaches that point, you are already exhausted because of the outdated scripting tropes. And even the investigation and its finding feel very familiar and less exciting. With too much pointless footage crowding the film, Kochaal becomes a dull ride.

Sreekuttan is our hero. Because of his short height, people mockingly call him Kochaal, and thus he couldn’t clear police selection. But his father, who was a police officer, died while in service, and that allowed Sreekuttan to join the force. The movie focuses on one particular case where he shows the department his merit.

The primary issue I had with this movie is its outdated packaging. You have a hero introduction comedy sequence followed by Kochu Preman mocking him publically. Then we are introduced to his lover and then her father. It’s almost like seeing the recreation of some of those Jayaram movies in the ’90s. There is so much about the humiliation and love life of Sreekuttan in the first half, and almost all of them feel irrelevant when you look at the movie’s second half. The interval block is actually the beginning of the real story. Even though the thriller format isn’t creating any curiosity, I was glad that the writers finally got some focus.

Shyam Mohan tries to package it in a very unappealing way. From dialogues to situations, there is a forced dramatic feel to Kochaal. Writers Midhun and Prajith are trying to make things look subtle, but the making can’t achieve that subtle quality. When you finally know who the culprit was, it doesn’t feel like a shocking revelation. Instead, it felt more like they assigned the crime to a random character and then created a backstory to justify that. Murali Gopy is introduced as a brilliant police officer. I could understand their decision to make that character egoistic. But the buffoon-like interpretation was hard to digest.

As the central character, Krishna Shankar was okay. There wasn’t much there for him to do because the writing for that character was already dull. Shine Tom Chacko serves as this distraction villain who plays Babu in his typical reckless style. Murali Gopy was okay as the senior police officer, but like I already said, the comical interpretation of that character was really odd. Vijayaraghavan, Indrans, Renji Panicker, Chembil Ashokan, etc., are the other major names here.

Kochaal is an unexciting police thriller that takes an awfully long time to get some focus. But even after that, the familiarity in the scripting doesn’t help the film in being compelling. Kochaal is a formulaic thriller that would have felt like an okay one if it had been released two decades back.