When writers pitch their idea to famous directors or actors, there will always be a one-line idea that may have made the movie exciting for them. The new Nadirshah movie, Magic Mushrooms, written by Akash Dev, was one film where I was constantly trying to find what they wanted to convey. I mean, if you try to narrate the story of the movie to someone, they might ask you questions like, ” Then why were all those scenes shown? What was the purpose of that song? etc. The wayward structure of the screenplay of this movie would make you wonder whether the makers were implying through the title that you need a certain level of high to find the developments in this script sensible.
Ayon, aka Kocherukkan, a native of Kanjikkuzhi, is our hero. And he is your typical Vishnu Unnikrishnan character: a jobless, hopeless dude who falls in eternal love at first sight. While trying to make some quick money by doing some fraud stuff, he crosses paths with a girl named Janaki. Janaki was a peculiar person, and their relationship evolved into something big very quickly. What we see here are the events that happen in this relationship after a point.
If you look at the promos and trailer of this movie, you can clearly see the desperation of the makers to make this movie look less dated. At the very end of the movie’s trailer, the then-trending “Jomu” was added as audio. And they released a promo material where we see Vishnu Unnikrishnan talking to Abin Bino about his concerns over sitting next to a woman in a bus. Jomu thing is not in the movie, and the bus thing was something they dubbed differently for the promo. There is a scene in the movie where we see a bus journey, and there are shots of the driver. If this movie got delayed for one more week, I am pretty sure Nadirshah would have released a promo material with the visuals of that driver with the Manamulla Poo Nulli song playing in the background. From a scene that has a boy screaming “Ammachi Paambu” to Santhivila Dinesh himself saying “Azhukka Chekkan, Thanthayekkal Mosham,” you can see Nadirshah trying to make this movie funny and failing miserably.
The real mess is the script of the movie that has absolutely no clue what it wants to achieve. In the initial areas, we are seeing this usual “she ditched me, man” cry of the hero. So when we see a new female character, we would assume we are in for a love story. Then, suddenly out of the blue, the recurring trauma of the hero will pop up. Then we would feel that trauma would play a role in this love story. However, the script will shift focus onto the heroine, and her switch from introvert to extrovert makes no sense. The way this love story starts to act like some sort of Romeo and Juliet abruptly, made me wonder whether I slept during the movie or they lost any of the hard disk. The transition of the screenplay from one phase to another is so bizarre that I thought Nadirshah made 4 songs and then wrote stuff around them to make it look like a movie.
Vishnu Unnikrishnan gets to play a character that can be called Kanjikkuzhiyile Rithwik Roshan. The same traits, a similar character arc, and even a performance that feels the same. Akshaya Udayakumar plays the female lead in this movie. She portrays the different moods of that character convincingly. Unfortunately, the script wasn’t giving her any support in making those transitions sensible. Abin Bino plays the always supportive friend with stupid ideas. Chooral fame Shameer Khan is part of the cast and cracks a lot of pure Malayalam lines to rescue this dead-on-arrival film. At first, I thought Sidharth Bharathan would end up as the villain of this movie, like Shammi. However, he eventually became a Joker character and ultimately a pointless character. Pooja Mohanraj’s role made me wonder whether I was about to see an empowered woman in a Nadirshah film, but he made sure I was expecting too much by making that character a caricature. Names like Jaffer Idukki, Harisree Asokan, Johny Antony, Aju Varghese, etc., are part of the cast with roles that rarely made an impact.
There is a scene in the movie where Vishnu Unnikrishnan’s character tries to advise the heroine’s father by calling religion an added flavor in love. The flavor metaphor was so bad that when the girl’s father cusses him for saying it, the whole theater was laughing at the hero, as they found the reaction of the father more sensible. Many directors are still oblivious about the reality that short-form content is available to people for free, and they don’t need to come to the theater and pay money to see the same stuff. Nadirshah’s movie is a clueless collage of memes that exposes how outdated and clueless he is in understanding an evolving audience.
