Bullet Diaries Review | Yet Another Friday, Yet Another Dhyan Sreenivasan Debacle

Written and directed by Santhosh Mandoor, Bullet Diaries, starring Dhyan Sreenivasan, is a lazy drama that just wants to utilize the love for Bullet on a very peripheral level. With the drama in the story getting unnecessarily stretched out with pointless deviations, just to make the movie’s length roughly two hours, Bullet Diaries is a bland creation that you just sit through without any emotions.

Raju, a mechanic who specializes in Royal Enfield bikes, is the film’s hero. He has a Bullet of his own, which he takes care of as his child. One fine day, when he was enjoying a trip with his close friends, his bike got stolen by someone. In the movie Bullet Diaries, we see Raju’s efforts to find his bike in his own way.

At multiple moments in the movie we see characters saying lines like “Oh, I haven’t seen a Bullet lover like him.” In one specific scene, even the hero himself talks about his love for Bullet almost looking at the camera. With an elevating background score backing it up with a glossy shot of the bike, director Mandoor expects the audience to forget about the lack of nuances and a proper story. By the time the movie reaches the last act, where we are shown who actually stole the bike and the reason behind that, the predictability around that makes the film even more dull.

Dhyan Sreenivasan pretty much sleepwalks through this character that doesn’t challenge him at all. The only thing that feels a bit different from a usual Dhyan Sreenivasan movie is that he plays this slightly introverted person. Since the hero is on the introverted side, there is Althaf Salim to amplify the humor, which was executed badly. The whole Johny Antony track, created just for the sake of Theppu comedy, was also terrible. Late Pradeep Kottayam in a different person’s dubbing is there in this movie. Prayaga Martin, in her pre-hair color era, looks okay in a pointless heroine character. Sreelakshmi, Ranji Panicker, Nisha Sarang, Sudheer Karamana, Shalu Rahim, etc., are the other major names in the cast of this film.

A Bullet lover loses his bike and goes to find it. That’s the only idea behind the movie. There is no story development happening here to enhance this thought and create drama around it. Everything else in the film that enhances the movie’s running time is irrelevant to the main track. The romantic track is unnecessarily pushed towards the end. The backstory of the bullet is somewhat predictable, mainly because they cast a big actor in a seemingly insignificant role. Dialogues are pretty flat and at times extremely cheesy.

On the whole, it’s just another Dhyan Sreenivasan weekly dud that can be used in a debate about why Malayalam cinema is going through a terrible phase in terms of economics. Dhyan has famously said in interviews that he charges only a nominal fee keeping in mind the possible recovery of the movie. But if he doesn’t do a QC of the scripts he is getting, he is pretty much in danger of becoming the face of a phase that kept the audience away from the theaters, especially with people in the industry calling him “Friday star.”