Rosapoo

There was a movie named Matinee that released a few years back which tried to focus on the backstory of those people who were involved in the making of soft porn adult films which ruled our industry around the year 2000. Rosapoo starring Biju Menon and Neeraj Madhav in main roles along with Anjali, is a film that has an intention to address that phase. But director Vinu Joseph has tried to package it as an entertainer and thus this film becomes a suffocated comedy that doesn’t excite us at all.

Ambrose and Shajahan are friends. Shajahan has this nature of believing in the foolish ideas of a stupid MBA graduate and entering in to all those business ventures. Ambrose on the other hand aspires to be a good director and Bharathan is his role model. The movie Rosapoo actually talks about things that happen when Shajahan gets this idea to make soft porn movies on low budget and make huge profit out of it. And in that, Ambrose gets roped in as the director.

At one point in the movie, Ambrose rewrites the script to make it look less mediocre. While watching Rosapoo I felt that Vinu Joseph might have done the opposite of that while making Rosapoo. It feels like they added the entire Biju Menon comedy track and a lot of characters surrounding that in an attempt to make it look like one of those Biju Menon starrer comedies. An already average plot gets damaged due to that decision. The core of the story lies in the equation between Ambrose and the heroine Reshmi. And Reshmi appears in the film only in the second half. Began as a partially nonsensical comedy, Rosapoo tries to become a social preach by the end.

As always Biju Menon with his typical coolness carries the role neatly. But in the first half of the movie we would feel him struggling to make the poorly written comedy work. Neeraj Madhav looks more and more confident in becoming characters and he is the only positive in this movie. Anjali was also fine and the chemistry between Neeraj and Anjali was also fine. Soubin chips in with his usual numbers. And there are many stars in the film in forgettable roles.

Vinu Joseph tries to treat the subject as some kind of no brainer comedy and then suddenly takes a detour to make it a social preach. The movie is under constant mood swings and it is difficult to root for characters when you are not clear on how to treat the movie. The screenplay has a lot of portions that won’t make many problems even if they were removed. The predictability and the change in nature also make the experience underwhelming. The cinematography was average and the cuts were uneven. Background score might be right for the scene, but the flaws in screenplay affect that too. I felt Vivek Harshan got limited by lack of footage in certain sequences.

Rosapoo is a movie that tries to become a package rather than a movie. If they had focused on the core story between Ambrose and Reshmi, that climax one sees in the movie within this movie would have felt emotional.

Rating: 2/5