Aana Alaralodalaral

If you have noticed some of the small films that has got released in the recent past, you can see an attempt to recreate another movie like Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu where you have a village as the main protagonist and various people living there as important characters. Most of them were flops on an acceptance level because of the lack of originality. Aana Alaralodalaral (I feel sorry for those who do video reviews) is one more failed attempt to recreate something like a Ponumuttayidunna Tharavu.

Hashim and Parvathy are childhood friends. In their childhood, Hashim was accused of stealing something that belonged to Parvathy’s elephant Shekharan Kutti. That caused major issues in Hashim’s life and his father decided to move out of the village. Aana Alaralodalaral talks about the return of Hashim to settle the scores and how things change after that entry.

If witty dialogues are enough for you to enjoy a film, then this film has enough moments to keep you engaged. But when you look at the story and the events that unfold, you might end up scratching your head. After a point it loses its subtlety in being a social satire and it was depending too much on dialogue humor. Towards the climax it almost felt like they concluded it in a hurry as some stern characters agreed for certain things without any kind of persuasion.

It might have got marketed as film that has Vineeth Sreenivasan and Anu Sithara in lead roles, but when you look at the amount of time those actors get to perform, they don’t have much space. Vineeth Sreenivasan was fine in those scenes that demanded his comic chops but he loses grip when the character becomes serious. Anu Sithara has got a really small window to perform here. Suraj Venjaramood goes back to his old style of comedy which works occasionally. The huge cast of this film has names like Mamukkoya, Innocent, Vishak Nair, Thesni Khan, Hareesh, Biju Kuttan, Sreejith Ravi, Sreekanth Murali, Vijayaraghavan, Dharmajan and several others.

Dileep Menon is trying to cover up the weakness of the script by Sarath Balan by pampering the movie with comedy. It does help the movie a lot in keeping us engaged for its small runtime of exactly two hours. But you ultimately need a convincing story to the movie’s credit and the flawed attempts to make it a commercial entertainer and a social satire puts the movie in that confused zone. Cinematography and cuts were pretty average. Shaan Rahman’s tracks were somewhat interesting.

Aana Alaralodalaral could have been a harmless entertainer if they had clarity on how to structure this movie. Having an elephant at the center offered it the scope to do something unique, but the output they got here was pretty ordinary.

Rating: 2/5