Ente Mezhuthiri Athazhangal

Anoop Menon is making a comeback as a writer in movies after a gap of nearly 4 years. But it seems like the writer’s tools have gone back with this break and the new movie, Ente Mezhuthiri Athazhangal written by Anoop Menon which is directed by Sooraj Thomas is pretty much a pile of old-school melodrama with Anoop Menon level of intellectual sugar coating. With nothing new coming your way as a viewer this slow-motion filled beta Casanova is a tiring experience.

Sanjay (hope that’s the name) is a very famous chef who has a restaurant in Kochi that serves a special kind of Chicken Dish. It’s a dish that can improve your sex life and so all the men are in that restaurant to “get it”. The movie Ente Mezhuthiri Athazhangal is taking us to a flashback journey of the hero where he met his love and how this secret “Viagra” ingredient’s recipe came to his life.

A self-proclaimed Casanova hero is coming to an estate like setup and he falls for a girl and unlike any other girl he met, she simply ignores him. So the hero is lingering around her trying to build a relationship. One night due to certain conditions they had to share a room (something fresh!) and at one point seeing the hero’s generosity she just falls for him. If reading that gave you any sort of excitement, then Ente Mezhuthiri Athazhangal might be the love story you were looking for. Anoop Menon has this Imtiaz Ali kind of desire in him. But when Imtiaz Ali explores emotions like passion, loneliness, and struggle in his romantic equations, Anoop Menon is kind of stuck with lust. And his ability to create characters with some substance has deteriorated substantially. The two extended cameos by Dileesh Pothan and Lal Jose doesn’t make any sense and hats off to the creative mind who thought that this interval punch was great. (Calicut Crown Cinema’s projector operator had a better sense of placing intervals).

Anoop Menon has only one tone and he continues that here as well. We know his usual style of rendering dialogues and this was also just the repetition of that. Miya looks gorgeous and that’s perhaps the only quality the movie was demanding from her and I don’t know why they chose to dub her voice. Her voice is lovely and it is popular too. So that doesn’t make much sense to me. Alencier Lopez was a little too eccentric. Baiju has tried his best to make it look different from his usual yelling characters. Nirmal Palazhi’s character is Anoop Menon’s laughable attempt to show his progressiveness. Hannah Reji Koshy, V K Prakash, Nisa and a few more are there in forgettable roles.

Sooraj Thomas has previously directed the movie Pa Va featuring Anoop Menon and Murali Gopy. In Ente Mezhuthiri Athazhangal which is “written and designed” by Anoop Menon, there is hardly anything Sooraj has done to make it look authentic. Filmmakers have this perception that visual lushness is a criterion for quality and that misunderstanding has reduced this already clichéd story to a different level. Jithu Damodar’s frames are only focusing on such grandeur and slow motion. The Casanova + Kuch Kuch Hota Hai style story from Anoop Menon is highly predictable and there are times the movie gets stuck on totally pointless subplots. Talking about physical relationship and lust isn’t a bad thing. But if the content is stuck on that, then that’s an underestimation about the viewer’s thinking capacity. Music and background score are fine as a separate entity and in the movie they weren’t blended correctly.

Ente Mezhuthiri Athazhangal is an outdated movie with typical Anoop Menon level of coolness which also feels like a bit outdated these days. Anoop Menon wants to express his opinion on a lot of things including religion and certain political scenarios. But in this muddled shallow script, those attempts look lame.

Rating: 2/5