Nagendran’s Honeymoons Review | A Sluggish Marriage Comedy With Unimaginative Writing

In a recent interview with Sidharth Roy Kapoor by Suchin Mehrotra, they were discussing the problems with the possible boom of TV Plus content in the OTT space with giants like Jio Cinema coming into the market. For your information, TV Plus is a new industry term that creates shows with a lot of episodes and has a sensibility similar to the daily soaps in order to tap into the larger population who are into such creations. I am talking about this in my review of Nithin Renji Panicker’s latest Hotstar special, Nagendran’s Honeymoons because the oversimplification and lack of nuances made me think it has that TV Plus nature, and to my surprise, when I finished the series, the next thing Hotstar suggested was a daily soap.

The premise is pretty simple here. The story is set against the backdrop of the late ’70s, and our leading man, Nagendran, is a lazy, jobless fellow who wants to become rich by going to Kuwait. When he struggled to have enough money for the Visa processing, his friend Soman, a marriage broker and a drama artist, suggested the idea of getting married to get some dowry money. The various marriages Nagendran commits to have the desired money and how that changes his life is what one sees in Nagendran’s Honeymoons.

Mild spoilers ahead! So, if you look at the story’s structure, you can see that it is basically a movie. You have a premise, then by the end of the third episode, there is the entry of this policeman who is now searching for Nagendran, and at the end, we have a twist. I agree with the fact that the final twist in the tale is an acceptable one, considering the humorous tone of this series. But to reach there, the series is taking an awful lot of time, and that too by dragging the narrative way too much. The lack of enthusiasm in the storytelling and overtly simplified character-building just makes the series very basic.

The series is produced, written, and directed by Nithin Renji Panicker. As I already said, the series’ pacing is extremely sluggish in the initial episodes. In the episodes that come later, the pacing doesn’t become that much of a problem because we are finally getting to see some amount of drama in the writing. But there again, the events are not that exciting. What I hated the most in the series was the usage of background score. It was almost like they understood the slow pacing of the episodes is making it difficult to watch, and they must give a minimum of 30 minutes duration for Hotstar, and hence, Ranjin Raj is filling up all dull bits with background score. The most annoying level of the usage of background score came in the Savithri episode. The edits are also finding it extremely difficult to make the content engaging for the viewers.

Suraj Venjaramood is basically playing a toned-down version of the kind of comical roles he used to play in the early days of his career. There are instances where that style of physical acting saves certain scenes. But at the same time, the comical shocks of Nagendran look very odd in certain scenes. Alexander Prasanth gets a full-fledged prominent role in this series. I think he must have had the most number of lines in the entire show. The heroines are the major part of the idea. But in terms of scope to performance, each of them may have a 15-minute screen time in totality. Grace Antony is trying hard to make the lunatic character given to her look funny. Shwetha Menon, Niranjana Anoop, Alphy Panjikkaran, etc., have characters that don’t really stay with us. Kani Kusruthi is perhaps the only female actor in the series who managed to get a fairly good screen time, and she was able to bring some charm to a sloppily written character.

On paper, this series that came with the tagline, One Life Five Wives, was supposed to be funny. But the end result we see on screen is far too simple and sluggish. As I said in the beginning, if converting the Chandanamazha fans into binge-watchers is what Hotstar is aiming for survival, then this might well be the crash course they need.