Brother’s Day

The debut directorial of Kalabhavan Shajon, Brother’s Day is a movie that just goes on and on in an attempt to be a so-called family entertainer. The beginning portions of the movie promised to be an entertainer similar to something like an Amar Akbar Anthony. But when it came to the second half of the movie things go really typical and tedious, making it a loud and forgettable experience on the whole.

Rony is this young guy who works with a catering team. One day he happens to meet a rich crazy guy named Chandi. The friendship grew and Chandi introduced Rony to his daughter Santa as well. The story of Brother’s Day revolves around an issue Santa faced. The link of that issue with Rony and how it all eventually comes to a solution is what the movie showing.

When you look at Brother’s Day in totality, you can clearly sense a lack of conviction in the scripting. Shajon has a psycho villain who blackmails people and extorts money. Everything else is added up forcefully. There are so many things happening in the first half that contributes to many songs and comedy which all are simply forgotten for a large chunk of the second half. Madonna Sebastian is in a way the heroine of the movie and in the second half, you will be struggling to find any trace of her. I was a bit relieved seeing a Prithviraj free from all the English, darkness and Jew things. But if you look at the second half of Brother’s Day, what happens is somewhat the same with a slightly different texture.

On-screen Prithviraj is kind of free-flowing in the first half. His ability to perform comedy is still on the stiffer side but yet there was a considerable fluency in his performance. In the second half, he becomes the typical Prithviraj who is always gasping in his usual style. Aishwarya Lekshmi has perhaps got the next big role in the film and she was fine considering how weak the writing was. I still can’t understand why Santa was obeying the villain in some of those sequences. Prayaga has done the role of Rony’s sister. Miya and Madonna Sebastian are the other two female leads who are easily forgettable. Vijayaraghavan scored a lot in the initial portions of the movie. Prasanna plays a monotonous antagonist who after a point became a bit funny. Kalabhavan Shajon has tried to include almost everyone from the mimicry industry in his first outing as a director, but he forgot to talk about them in the second half.

Kalabhavan Shajon has openly admitted that he doesn’t know much about the direction and it was his crew that helped him in making the movie completely. What he has done here completely by himself is the scripting and I have to say that it is a movie that is trying desperately to be an entertainer. Brother’s Day wants to have everything inside it. Comedy, tragedy, suspense, dance numbers, fight sequences are all there. But the packaging is untidy and most of it is added up separately. There are so many sequences, especially in the first half that can be easily edited out. Even a movie like Amar Akbar Anthony had such scenes which are there for the sake of comedy. But the kind of hilarious entertainment those scenes provided due to its freshness was not there in the scenes Shajon created. The second half of the film is a predictable thriller. The twists aren’t that unsettling and the tiring length of the movie in the hill station phase just makes it tedious experience. The cinematography of Jithu Damodar is average. The edits couldn’t make the fight sequences look slick. The songs aren’t happening organically. But the songs on an album level were fine.

Brother’s Day started off giving a feeling that it could be an easy stress buster entertainer. But somewhere in the midway it lost its focus and decided to follow a usual trajectory without any charm. Clocking at almost 160+ minutes (almost 3 hours including interval), Brother’s Day is not an easy ride.

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