Bicycle Thieves

In the climax of the movie Bicycle Thieves the hero compares the planning of the villain as “new generation siddiq lal” story. Well after watching Bicycle Thieves I too felt the same about the movie. Too many twists, explanations kind of takes away the simplicity the movie created. Characters who left the scene at some point returns at very distant locations in the screenplay and frankly speaking I wasn’t that excited to see those timely returns.

The story here has the central protagonist Kunchako aka Chako. As he lost his parents in the early childhood and also because of the kind of insult he faced from relatives makes him runaway from the shelter of his uncle. Thereafter Chako happens to meet some people who smuggled stolen bicycles. The bicycle loving Chako joins them in their business. The movie basically is built around one failed operation of this gang to make some money.

A large portion of the movie somewhere reminded me Sathyan Anthikkad’s Mammootty starer Kalikkalam. The social service part of Chako’s conman play reminded me of that. You can even see that needy helper similar to the character played by Sreenivasan. I am not comparing Bicycle Thieves with Kalikkalam as we rarely see police in this story. Used out ideas are implemented to show the coolness of the hero’s “professional ” skills. Somewhere in the middle there are some enjoyable portions that matches the expectations with some good humor, emotions and lightness which saves the movie from being boring.

Asif Ali is comfortable in this kind of characters and he has done his part nicely. Making him do serious stunts wasn’t a great idea. Aparna Gopinath was good in her character. The performance of Vijay Babu was really a surprise and now I know why Lal Jose opted him for his next film. Salim Kumar was finding it difficult to make the audience laugh. Very small roles for Sai Kumar, Devan, Siddiq and Sunil Sukhada. I have no clue what was Aju Varghese and Ambrose Perrera (Balu) doing there in this movie. It was like those outdated tamil movie where you would see some comedians doing stuff totally irrelevant to the plot. KPAC Lalitha, Saiju Kurup and many more are there in the star cast.

Well the script is a bit disjoint and Jis Joy has tried to make it look ordered. The story deviates from its nucleus regularly in its journey towards the twist filled climax. Direction follows the conventional styles. Dialogs aren’t that natural. Visuals are nice. Edits are okay. Deepak Dev’s Music and BG scores are somewhat repetitive but still enjoyable.

Overall Bicycle thieves is a watchable movie. I couldn’t sense any particular great plus points about this movie, but its not a boring one. My rating for Bicycle Thieves is a 2.5/5.