Detective Ujjwalan, the new Dhyan Sreenivasan starrer, is part of the Weekend Cinematic Universe, and looking at the less supernatural texture of this movie, it doesn’t really feel like a part of the Minnal Murali universe. There was a court case that restricted the makers from using the characters in Minnal Murali in this movie. Hence, the only Minnal Murali reference I could see here was the mention of Manchadikkadu in a dialogue. Coming to Detective Ujjwalan, the predominant focus is on generating fun elements around this seemingly looser title character. While the Kudos Media tonality in some humorous bits makes it funny, the story starts to feel generic once we get to the finale. With the humor largely making the film engaging, Detective Ujjwalan is a passable watch.
Plachikkavu is the village of our hero, Ujjwalan. He is this bachelor guy who has a library with many detective books. He is also a local Sherlock Holmes, solving small crimes like missing pets and ornaments. Since the police force in that village was weak, he frequently helped them. But things took a drastic turn when an unknown masked man started to kill people in a specific way in that village, and it seemed like a case beyond Ujjwalan’s capabilities. How Ujjwalan and the police deal with this unprecedented scenario is what we see in Detective Ujjwalan.
Even though Minnal Murali had the structure of a generic origin story of a superhero, the way they placed the story in settings that are familiar to us and also how they designed a solid backstory for the bad guy made it an appreciable effort. When it comes to Ujjwalan, the antagonist track feels underwhelming because of the familiarity with the design. Indraneel and Rahul, the debut directors who have written this film as well, are definitely trying to make the villain’s backstory solid by giving it more and more twists. But the thing is, it is not coming across as something we have not seen till now. There are areas in the film where certain characters turn emotional after a particular point, like the characters played by Rony David and Seema G Nair. But you are not really able to feel the emotional heft in those moments.
The Ujjwalan character is not necessarily a challenging one for Dhyan Sreenivasan as an actor. In fact, when you look at the looser detective characterization of Ujjwalan, Dhyan’s inherent ability to pull off humor makes him a sensible choice for the character. If the universe manages to eventually team up every character in the future, Ujjwalan might well be that comic relief character who gives smart suggestions. Siju Wilson as Shambhu is your typical sharp police officer, and the story is giving him the spotlight when it comes to fights. The Kudos team Ameen, Nihal, Nibraz, and Shahubas are basically in the movie to cash in on their online popularity. While Ameen and Nihal were able to make the audience laugh out loud on a few occasions in their usual style, Nibraz and Shahubas were pretty much background artists. Kottayam Nazeer handled the humor neatly as the father character. Rony David as SI Sachin was also memorable. The actor who played the part of the antagonist is a bit too animated in certain scenes.
The world of Minnal Murali had a very close similarity with the setting of other Basil Joseph movies. Indraneel and Rahul are able to set their story in a similar retro setting, and that makes it easy for them to set the humorous tone of the film. Where the movie fails to generate excitement is in building suspense around its villain. We can predict all the misleading plot twists, and the only seemingly impressive bit was the plan they executed to hurt the killer’s ego. But after that, when the movie goes to the backstory and a twist after that, it just feels less imaginative. The cinematography has a very vibrant feel, with warm tones and soft focus in many areas. The songs are fine, but none of it really stands out as a catchy one.
Detective Ujjwalan doesn’t feel like an integral film that is required for the universe to expand at this point. There are a couple of characters who are left without closure in this film, and looking at how these universe-format movies are designed, you can sort of predict who will team up with which forces to create drama. With Kudos Media humor and predictable yet not-so-underwhelming twists keeping things afloat, Detective Ujjwalan is a middling addition to the WCU.
