Venicile Vyaapari

“Vencile Vyapaari” of Shafi is a movie that had a lot of scope but failed to convince the audience due to uneven pace in the screenplay and a lot of conventional style of movie making. The movie has an interesting retro plot, but it hasnt used its retro style for the sake of the movie. The one thing that makes me feel annoyed is that script writer James Albert is also seems to be following a pattern for all his movies. ‘Classmates’, ‘Cycle’, ‘Ividam Swargamaanu’ and now ‘Venicile Vyapaari’, all seems to have similar structure.

“Vencile Vyapaari” is the story of constable Pavithran, played by Megastar Mammootty. Pavithran is assigned as a secret police for the investigation of a murder case. For this he disguises himself as a merchant and goes to Alappuzha. What happens to Ajayan’s life through the investigation and after that is the content of vencile vyaapari. The beginning of both first and second half is really enjoyable. But the endings and some of the casting or I should say character molding was not satisfying. Towards the climax the movie gave the feeling of a Joshy, Udayakrishna-Sibi K Thomas type action thriller formula.

In the performance side, nobody delivered a bad performance. Mammootty was very much apt as the Vyapaari Pavithran. He looked amazingly young in the “Kannum Kannum ” song, but also looked alarmingly old in some scenes in the second half. Kavya Madhavan delivered a descent performance as Ammu. Poonam Bajwa as Mahalakshmi had very little in the film for her to do.Jagathy, Janardhanan, Suresh Krishna, Vijayaraghavan etc all gave their honest share to the movie. Suraj and Salim Kumar handled the comedy section very neatly.

In the off screen side, Shafi’s direction style wasnt apt for a movie with this kind of story line. James Albert’s screenplay was smooth for the first 1 hour. But after that it got messed up. Emotional scenes wasnt able to make the audience emotional due to the uneven pace of the screenplay. Some of the dialogs of Suraj and Salim Kumar was good. The script failed to contain many of the characters in the movie.
Shamdat’s cinematography and the editing helped Mafia Sasi’s stunts look bit more interesting. Music is good but not much catchy.

Overall “Vencile Vyaapaari” is an average movie. It is not an utter disappointment. But I expected a much better cinema from the writer of CLASSMATES. “Vencile Vyapaari” is an average one time watch. My rating for Shafi’s “Venicile Vyapaari” is 2.5/5.