Aamayum Muyalum

Some stories look sensible on screen as it matches the culture and backdrop of the place they are set in. Aamayum Muyalum from veteran director Priyadarshan is the remake of his own hit bollywood movie Malamaal Weekly. The illiterate characters living in a lawless land seemed like a possible plot in Malamaal Weekly as it was set in a rural north Indian village. But when it comes to Aamayum Muyalum, it is quite difficult to connect to the backdrop. Bombarded with Priyadarshan’s signature chaos clichés towards the end, Aamayum Muyalum is duller than its original.

Kesu is a lottery agent in the village and he is the only educated man of this village which is kind of ruled by a lady (forgot the name, even wiki doesn’t know it). One day one of the tickets sold by Kesu manages to win the first prize of 5 crore rupees and Kesu’s crooked mind decides to get back the ticket from the one who bought the ticket. His attempt to get the lottery ticket back and the troubles, chaos and confusion that happens after that is what this movie talking about.

For your information, Jayasurya is not playing the character of Kesu. The main characters of the movie are portrayed by Nedumudi Venu and Innocent. I was curious to know how Priyadarshan would make changes in the story line to give some more significance to the character played by Jayasurya, but to my surprise the film looked like a dubbed version of the Hindi. From small counter dialogues to even most of the locations, Aamayum Muyalum is an exact replica of Malamaal Weekly. Most of the plots and subplots doesn’t look convincing when it got transplanted to Malayalam and Priyadarshan has used his signature style of confusion climax to make sure that audience will understand that this is his film, even without title credits.

On screen Nedumudi Venu was nice as Kesu. Innocent’s lack of energy is clearly effecting the comic timing and still he manages to make the audience laugh with his typical mannerisms. Jayasurya’s character has very less screen time when compared to the actors I mentioned above. Piaa Bajpai is just about okay in her poorly dubbed character. Ambika, Mamukoya, KPAC Lalitha, Sukanya, Kochu Preman, Harishree Ashokan, Idavela Babu, Nandu, Sona and many more are there in the long star cast. Anoop Menon plays a very small yet important character.

Making wise, it is typical Priyadarshan stuff with backdrop of village and colored caricature characters. Confusion and chaos are integral parts of a Priyadarshan script and it is there for sure. Script of the movie hasn’t undergone any sort of change in its journey from Bollywood to Mollywood. As I already said dialogues, situations, locations and even the edit patterns are very much the same. Cinematography was nice. Conventional style music from M G Sreekumar (haven’t heard any copying allegations till now) and the visualization was nice from Priyadarshan. BGMs were a bit uneven.

Overall Aamayum Muyalum is a disappointing film. The Malayalam version seems to have a bigger budget and technical quality visually, but still it looks dull at most points with humor and sentiments not really working. The rating for Priyadarshan’s Aamayum Muyalum is 2/5.