Director Sajil Mampad, who previously made Kadakan, had said that the first title he had in mind for his new movie was El Clásico, but since it was already registered, he had to settle for something similar and ended up with Derby. Somewhere, it feels like a bit of a relief as I don’t need to associate my memory of something like El Clásico with a movie like this. Derby is a movie that feels like the Gen Z version of what if there was a movie about Real Fighters and Royal Warriors of Mammootty’s Masterpiece. Written by Ameer Suhail and Zahru Zuhara, this one has a good chunk of content creators in Malayalam, and yet struggles to have any amount of content in its script.
Arjun, Sandeep, Yousuf, Shawn, Hibathullah, and Maria are the gang of friends in this movie. Arjun, Sandeep and Maria were together during plus two, so they knew each other. What we see in Derby is the three years of their college life, where they are constantly fighting either their seniors or their juniors.
Narrating the story of this movie in five minutes would be a really easy task. It’s like a bunch of people go to college, they get ragged, they fight with the seniors, they get suspended, they fight with the seniors, they get suspended, and then they fight with the juniors, and they again get suspended. In the middle of all this, there will be two romances, one college tour, and an accident. It’s like the effort here is to make sure that nothing the audience sees on frame should feel like a new thing. The dialogues are ultra-generic, the characterisations are awfully cliched and to make things bad in a grand way, the script introduces a helicopter into the campus. I must appreciate the courage of Sajil Mampad. Because he puts the title and director credit of the movie as the interval block. After showing one hour of tediously bad campus content, you really need an immense amount of confidence to do that and hope people won’t leave the theater thinking the movie ended.
The writing in the first half is shuttling between the usual back-and-forth fight of the seniors and juniors. But after the first half, the movie is clueless about what to do next, as they still have to show one more year of college in this movie. So out of the blue comes a movie shooting to kill some time in the second half. Everything we think will become a conflict will have an easy resolution, for example, Arjun has a crush on his senior. Once the seniors are gone, the movie again runs out of ideas, and it tries a beta Yeh Jawani Hey Deewani with Arjun and Maria, which was obvious from the very beginning. It is okay to have a campus movie show a final year tour where a lot of things change. But in this movie, it is like a celebration of stereotypes. There is even an accident sequence happening during the college tour, and God knows the purpose of that whole scene.
The movie has the cinematography of someone like Abhinandan Ramanujam, and the work was extremely flat. The fight sequences in the movie lacked euphoria. They wanted to project Adam Sabiq as this hero material, and unfortunately, the editor was fighting for him, and even he couldn’t save him. Gopi Sunder delivers yet another forgettable album. The dance choreography in that initial arts day song is horrendously bad. In this movie, there is a part where a bunch of seniors are killing a cat to ruin a certain plan, and they are all wearing a certain costume while doing it. Derby is a collection of such nonsense and some cheesy romantic cliches.
Adam Sabiq, who was last seen in Abraham Ozler playing the younger version of Mammootty, plays the lead role here, and I must say his acting is extremely disappointing. In the first half, when he is trying to flirt with every girl, he is making that character a joker, and instead of the character being funny, the performance just makes the character an annoyance. Ameen, as Shawn, is saving the movie at many places with dialogues that I believe he made up in those moments. Hari Sivaram, as Yousuf, gets to play a pretty usual character. Anu’s Sandeep has hardly anything to do here. Rish NK’s Hibathullah transitions from being completely religious to a cool dude, and that’s it. Jasnya Jayadeesh as Maria, Suparna S as Meharin, and Pani fame Ann Merlet are all there with characters with no depth. Sivaraj, as the antagonist, struggles to make an impression. The posters featuring Sagar Surya are actually quite misleading. He comes only in the last quarter of the film, with perhaps a combined screen time of 15 minutes, out of which a majority is his slow-motion walks. Johny Antony makes sure that his usual comedy adds to the irritation caused by this movie.
At times when I watch roast videos of a certain category of Malayalam films, I would wonder whether young filmmakers and writers are watching them, thinking they should make sure their movie won’t get bashed like this for being outdated and outright bad. The fact that despite all those movies becoming box office bombs and roasting blockbusters, there are still people who come up with movies with the same mediocrity is a baffling reality. Derby is a collection of pointless episodes. The pointlessness is so evident that there is a whole episode featuring names like Shine Tom Chacko and Shabareesh Varma, and I don’t even feel like talking about that part of the movie, as it was complete trash.
