Aby

The climax of the film Aby starring Vineeth Sreenivasan will give you a little bit of Goosebumps as it somehow manages to create a feeling of an achievement in that last bit. But the approach up to that point isn’t that smooth for Aby. The structure and feel of Aby is almost similar to what we got to see in last year’s Kunchako Boban film KPAC. Honesty is there in the theme, but the making just isn’t absorbing or novel enough to give you that satisfaction.

Aby is this special child who always had this wish to fly. In the childhood when he wasn’t much aware about the technicalities, he caused a lot of issues by jumping from places. The financially weak background and the uneasy family life never gave Aby an opportunity to gather knowledge through the educational system. The movie actually depicts Aby’s efforts to learn about everything he could to make his dream of flying come true.

Much like the promos of the film, Aby is largely trying to be that usual entertainer Malayalam film. Having heard all the controversies and the fact that it is loosely based on the life of Saji Thomas, I was hoping to see a film that looks into the journey of Aby in making an aircraft. But Srikant Murali’s Aby isn’t trying much in those areas. We get to see the life of the title protagonist through the usual way of depicting miseries and charm. The film tries to shift gears in the second half with the introduction of a man who knows more about the technical side of building planes. The “coincidence” level of these two meeting was a little too much to digest and I don’t really understand the reason why that character gets angry at our hero at a point where nothing looked problematic. After that phase, we do get the dosage of typical comedy and predictable narrative.

Vineeth Sreenivasan as Aby was okay. The dialogues were relatively less for him and the portrayal depended a lot on body language where he occasionally loses grip. The boy who played the childhood of Aby had that fine control.   Mareena Michael as Anumol was good. Sudheer Karamana was nice as the father. Suraj Venjaramood gets a character the sort of uses both sides of his acting. Vinitha Koshy was good. Aju Varghese’s character doesn’t have much of significance in the narrative. Manish Choudhary (whom I loved in Rocket Singh) plays the role of GK and he was Okay (Ashwin’s voice and dialect sort of matched the character).

Srikant Murali needs to add a little more realism in to the scenes. The script from Santhosh Echikkanam doesn’t have many surprises or any exciting challenge to offer. It is a mix of a typical Malayalam movie with numerous characters, love, humor, revenge etc. and the thought of a boy’s dream to fly. The head and tail of the story are guessable and the middle portion that has the involvement of this character GK, isn’t completely convincing. Edits weren’t that good. Frames were good and so was the music.  A special mention to Anil Johnson’s elevating background score.

So to conclude, Aby isn’t a lazy film for sure. It has an intention to tell a story of achievement in an entertaining way, but the path chosen needed elements that can move the audience emotionally. Aby is fine, but not inspiring.

Rating: 2.5/5