Careful

The good thing about the Kannada movie U Turn was that it stayed close to the female lead of the film and added an element of supernatural activities very effectively. Even after being a social preach about obeying traffic rules, the treatment and the ghost factor made U Turn an engaging watch. When it comes to careful, the official Malayalam remake of U Turn, writer Rajesh Jayaraman stretches it at irrelevant points and takes away the spooky element from the content. With V K Prakash struggling keep all the events intact, careful becomes a dull thriller that doesn’t have the kind of intrigue the original version had.

Rachana is this intern in a news paper. She is struggling to find a good material to create a story. She finally decides to make a story by doing interview of people who broke traffic laws. Rachana faces set back in the beginning of this process itself when she falls in to legal trouble due to certain unfortunate deaths. How those deaths happened and what it has to do with the specific story Rachana is trying to cover is what Careful is dealing with.

What is an appreciable thing about careful is that they haven’t tried to create a scene by scene copy of U Turn. You can see VKP and team trying enhancing and minimizing the story here and there. But eventually those experiments become the problem. The supernatural element in U Turn was the one thing that kept us all guessing and the Malayalam script reduces it hugely. Some scenes got an entirely low key presentation. The original towards the end kept us a little bit excited because of certain confusions and here we don’t get to see that.

Sandhya Raju isn’t that convincing as that earnest journalist Rachana. Her dubbing and acting lacked sync. Vijay Babu was okay as SI Jayakrishnan. I don’t know why they added all those unnecessary humor to the character played by Asokan. Parvathy Nambiar’s serious portrayal offered unintentional comedy. Vineeth Kumar was good in his role. Saiju Kurup was just okay and his last dialog went really flat (I would blame the writer for that). Joemol makes a comeback through this movie in a character that doesn’t really give her much of a test. Rest of the cast has people like Sreejith Ravi, Mukundan, Aju Varghese, Sreejaya Nair and a few more.

V K Prakash can’t really create the kind of tension U Turn managed to create. The reconstructed screenplay has missed a lot of small key points which made us look at the story through the journalist’s perspective. In careful the narrative sort of looks at everyone’s version of it and in the midst of that it loses the quintessential intrigue. The Karma element in the original got lost in translation here. The dialogues are too dramatic. Frames aren’t that impressive. The cuts go haywire at many areas. The background score was way too excessive.

For an argument you can say that Careful deals with a socially relevant subject. But films should have cinematic elements to convey such thoughts effectively. Careful just doesn’t have that kind of quality one would expect.

Rating: 2/5