“Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director.” This is a famous quote by director James Cameron. This is the second time in a month I have been forced to remind some Malayalam filmmakers that when Cameron said this, he was talking about the baby steps of becoming a filmmaker. Films made using that logic need not be released in theaters where people actually pay money for quality entertainment. The Onam release from Omar Lulu, Bad Boyz, feels more like a shameless display of arrogance from the filmmaker indirectly saying I will snatch your money by selling nothing.
Explaining the premise of the movie will be an interesting task as the entire film seems to be an effort to have a premise. Antappan and his gang are infamous for all their goonda activities. Antappan is married to Mary, and his resort business is not doing that great. At one point, he accidentally attacked a notorious goon named Vettukad Benson, and Benson went into a coma. Hearing this news, a bunch of gangsters came to Antappan’s house and declared him as their leader. What all happens in the life of Antappan after this can be considered as the plot of this collage of instantaneously shot comedy scenes.
Usually, when you review even a bad film, you tend to explain the shoddiness using craft-oriented elements like poor screenplay or underwhelming making. In the case of Bad Boyz, it is a sense of numbness. The movie has zero structure, and it feels like Omar asked his screenwriter to create scenes on the spot based on the reel or shorts he saw while coming to the set. Usually, in movies, we would say certain scenes could have been chopped as they are irrelevant to the plot. But in the case of Bad Boyz, almost 80% of the footage can be removed, and it still won’t affect the story.
It is like the scenes were written based on the availability of actors, and since most of the actors we see in this movie are rarely seen in movies these days, I think Omar had the luxury of doing spot improvisations. Starting from the black belt-seat belt joke to the final fart joke, the movie is giving stiff competition to those terrible comedy skits we see on TV. The makers seem to be very confident of the fact that the old Tamil movie style of including track comedy and pointless songs has an audience even in 2024. Well, even the tacky Tamil movies that still follow the above-mentioned formula bothered to have a story, but Bad Boyz feels like they began the shooting with the ideology “let’s see where the script will take us today.”
Omar Lulu and writer Sarang are actually following the principles of the writers of Breaking Bad. They are taking the story forward just by thinking about what these characters will do in this particular scenario, and the movie decides to ignore whatever is happening till that point and goes after this new idea. Since Omar has established that our gang is a bunch of lunatics, their impulsive decisions can be justified, and even in the most dramatic moments, you can see the movie slipping into a lame joke. One can definitely argue that you must see this movie as a spoof film, as they are constantly trolling LCU, Agent X, and many other things. But even for that, you need to feel a basic quality or genuine intent.
Evergreen Star Rahman is playing Antappan here in that Turbo Mammootty look with Unni Mukundan-style dialogue delivery of Malayalam lines. Senthil Krishna, Bibin George, and Anson Paul are doing the roles of the other members of the gang, and they are all trying to make the movie look entertaining, but without the basic support of a proper script, there is a limit for them as well. The presenter of the film, Sheelu Abraham, is the heroine, and she maintains consistency in delivering flawed performances one after the other.
Weekly star Dhyan Sreenivasan gets to do a police inspector role simply because Omar Lulu was not able to find an interval punch for the movie. And for a variety, we don’t get to see the Sabarimala excuse for the bearded look of Amjad Khan (Parallel universe confirming director brilliance). Aju Varghese and Saiju Kurup are in the film, probably due to pending EMIs. Babu Antony, Devan, Shankar, Bheeman Raghu, Bala, Santhosh Varkey, Alin Jose Perrera, the number of cameos and extended cameos in the movie can make Kevin Feige (Marvel CEO) insecure.
There is one scene in the movie where Antappan and the gang take a quotation from a film producer to threaten online reviewers as he claims review bombing is the reason why movies are not becoming hits. And one of the gang members replies to that claim, so it is not because the films you make are trash? It was a surreal moment where meta-humor peaked. Then I realized that Ubaini, the director of Rahel Makan Kora, the man who filed a case against reviewers saying the review bombing killed his film, is the chief associate director of this film. So, who are they really mocking? Themselves, reviewers, or the audience who paid to watch this film that will make them regret the existence of the brain?
Bad Boyz, feels more like a shameless display of arrogance from the filmmaker indirectly saying I will snatch your money by selling nothing.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
