Oru Anveshanathinte Thudakkam Review | A Torturous Wannabe Kannur Squad With M.A Nishad and Half of A.M.M.A

In filmmaking, when you start to edit the movie, there is this process called rough cut where everything they have shot will be arranged in the timeline, and it will be like a really long version of the movie. Some movies will have a duration of nearly 5 hours with all the scenes they have shot. From that, the editor will decide which one should stay in order to make the movie engaging for the viewer. The latest Malayalam film, Oru Anveshanathinte Thudakkam, written and directed by MA Nishad, who also portrays the main character in the movie, is one such film where it seems like editor John Kutty was forced to go with the rough cut or first cut since a lot of irrelevant content features the heroic rhetorics of the director/hero.

So the movie is about the missing of a man named Jeevan, who was a freelance journalist. Jeevan went missing a few days after his engagement. The lack of interest shown by the Kerala Police in finding him forced the family to move to the court, and the court asked the police to complete the task within a month. What we see in the movie is the investigation of the special team formed by the Kottayam Crime Branch to find Jeevan.

The duration of the movie is 181 minutes. I can confidently say that almost one hour of this movie can be chopped off very easily, and some of it can be shortened with effective voiceovers. In the first half of the film, they are just stretching the beginning of the investigation with unnecessary scenes. The family dynamics and the friendships of DySP Isaac Mammen and even the lazy approach of the Kottayam Crime Branch are very inconsequential to the central plot of the film, and the film is toiling with lame humor in that area. It is almost like they don’t have anything thrilling in the script, and hence, they are just delaying those bits. In one of the sequences, when the police are looking for traces in a crime site, MA Nishad tells Shaheen Siddique to search properly because a crime site is a goldmine of clues. I am like, “Dude, he is a qualified officer, not a fifth-standard student.” There are more dialogues like “Manjumalayude attam” and “Something is rotten in Denmark” mostly uttered by MA Nishad’s character, making me wonder whether he made this movie to fulfill his wish to be an action hero on screen.

The interval block of the film is a forcefully created scene just to make the hero and his team walk in slow motion. In one of the shots that they show as mobile footage, the camera that was used to shoot the movie is visible. After the interval, the film shifts to other places like Mumbai and Punjab, and the storytelling just becomes even more bland. The second half is like one backstory after another. It is like they are testing your patience with backstories when you already know what may have happened. The backstories then give way for subplots that are just excruciatingly long and have no major purpose. The wannabe Kannur Squad aspects of the movie are making the makers create this unapproachable village in Tamilnadu, and the “mass” moments you see in those scenes are just facepalm stuff.

MA Nishad, the director, the writer, and the hero of the movie, definitely deserves a paragraph. In the initial moments of the film, I thought he was just a decoy, and once Sai Kumar’s character calls the CM office, we will see the introduction of our hero. But to my surprise and probably to the surprise of everyone in the audience, MA Nishad was the investigating officer. Everything anyone who wants to be a hero wishes to do on the big screen is pretty much there as we see MA Nishad walk in slow motion, fight villains with that “Police Police” background score in the backdrop, crack humor and romance with his wife and even say punch dialogues. It’s like a segment of the actors in the industry decided to join MA Nishad when he expressed his wish to be a hero.

Coming to the rest of the cast, which is almost equivalent to the crowd you see at the AMMA general body meeting, there are only a few of them that have relevant characters. A role that any junior artist can play is given to Ramesh Pisharody just for the sake of poster value. Shine Tom Chacko might look like the hero from the posters, but he is more of a supporting character, and when he says some of those stiff dialogues in his typical style, it is somewhat unintentionally funny. I have heard Manju Pillai say in an interview that MA Nishad decided to shoot her scenes according to her convenience when she said she wasn’t available for the dates they asked for. After watching the movie, I was like, if that character was not there, it would have saved a lot of money for the producer and a significant time for the audience.

Vani Vishwanath has more footage in the promotion interviews of this movie than in the film. Swasika is introduced to us as this police officer who spends more time in the beauty parlor than in the office. And for a larger chunk of the time, she is just in the crowd. At one point, she starts to speak like this frustrated, dedicated officer who never gets appreciated just so that MA Nishad can say a dramatic monologue about the police force. Sudheesh, Baiju, Durga Krishna, Mukesh, Vijay Babu, Samuthirakani, Sshivada, Anumol, Alexander Prashanth, if I list the number of actors who have made brief appearances in the movie, that itself will be a paragraph long.

At the beginning of the movie, there is a scene where every police officer in the film laughs at the Kottayam Crime Branch as they are considered lazy and inefficient. The pathetic making of this movie with outdated sensibilities is so atrocious that after the film, people might end up laughing at the Crime Branch department in general. Oru Anveshanathinte Thudakkam is MA Nishad’s vanity dream that got shoved down the throat of the audience. If you are an aspiring editor, this movie is like free access to a first-cut version of a movie from which you can try to create a final cut version.