Cup Review | A Generic, Template Sports Drama That Lacks Intent

From the opening scene itself, Cup, the new Mathew Thomas starrer sports drama, has this on-your-face approach in terms of conveying its story. We have a voice-over of the hero who says winning the district cup is my aim. After that, every beat of the story is generic, and the efforts of Sanju V Samuel, the writer-director of the movie, to humanize the characters by giving them backstories stick out as a flawed strategy.

Nidhin Babu aka Kannan is our protagonist. He aspires to be the district badminton champion of Idukki. The first thing he did in that direction was to get admission at a school that would take him to the championship. Kannan’s efforts to crack the selection and the hardships he had to face after that is what we see in Cup.

The writing is the fundamental problem here. After forming a structure that has nothing unique to its credit, Sanju V Samuel tries to add various hurdles in front of our hero. Most of them are cliched, and the other ones just fade off immediately after their introduction into the story. Actually, the creation of certain conflicts is staged in a very exaggerated way. How the supportive mother decides to ignore the son after he makes a mistake is one such situation in the movie.

Mathew Thomas has a very earnest face that makes him an easy choice for characters who are optimistic but slightly insecure. Barring the flaws that happened in his performance due to the contrived writing, his performance was on the okay side. Karthik Vishnu, who played the part of Bineesh, Kannan’s close friend, manages to make the character memorable through certain scenes. In a movie where most of the actors were struggling to reduce the stiffness in the written dialogues, Basil Joseph was handling those lines effortlessly, making his minimal screen time character a memorable one.

Namitha Pramod, who makes an appearance in the second half as the coach, is trying to be the Chak De India Shah Rukh Khan, but unfortunately, the dialogue delivery is extremely flat, and it almost feels like she was saying the mugged-up lines. Jude Anthany Joseph plays this typical ego-driven bad guy whose purpose in the movie is very clear the moment he is introduced in the film. Guru Somasundaram, as Babu, the father of the hero, is trying really hard to speak fluent Malayalam, and that itself is a painful thing to sit through.

The film just goes on and on in the predictable trajectory from the beginning. Sanju V Samuel is very much ignoring the fact that the audience has seen quality sports drama. The cliched scripting tropes and evident placing of dialogues just expose the amateurishness of the writing. There is a moment in the movie where Anikha Surendran’s character asks Namitha Pramod’s coach character how she won a particular game after having lost the first set. There is no subtlety in the placement of that question, and you just know precisely that moment how the climax is going to get designed. There is no drama in the way the finale of the story is structured, and you just feel like sitting through something that you already know.

Cup is a sports drama that feels outdated and dull. Yes, even the recently released successful sports dramas also have a similar skeleton. But there is an intent to reinvent the familiar scripting method in those movies, which made them extremely enjoyable. The lack of that intent makes Cup a tiring, forgettable film.