Escape From Uganda

By the time Rajesh Nair’s Escape from Uganda reached its final quarter, the disappointment kind of increased for me as I felt they had a great chance to make a good prison break thriller. The shallow characters and swift narrative that fails to root the characters makes the larger portion of Escape from Uganda uninteresting and it gets that much needed acceleration only in those last portions .

The story here basically revolves around the life of a couple  Shikha and Jayakrishnan who flew to Uganda soon after their love marriage. A very unfortunate incident that Shikha happens to witness lands her in trouble and she ultimately gets imprisoned in that country where the judiciary isn’t that great for its functioning. How Jayakrishnan manages to bring his wife out of the prison and how they escape from that country is what this less than two hour long cinema trying to show us.

The problem with Escape From Uganda is in its scripting that cant really create solid characters. The first half has a larger focus on the past of the characters and that too had very little to offer. The around 45 minute longer first half cant really move on and it was all too fast. The success of the movie depended on the execution of the ESCAPE plan, but there wasn’t any refreshing tactics to make you applaud. For a modern day audience who has access to a variety of prison break films will not find these thrills as impressive. Keeping Parthiepan’s character in that unexplained state for a long time wasn’t a great idea.

On screen, more than Rima Kallingal I think the movie has given priority to the feelings of the husband which was portrayed by Vijay Babu. The actor did a convincing job and Rima was also good in her role. Parthiepan managed to deliver some coolness into the thriller. Joju George, Mukesh, Tashu Kaushik and some foreign actors are there in the star cast who were good in their respective roles.

Direction adapts a lot of modern day styles but fails in mixing them with the right impact. The emotional highs in the movie lacked that perfection in direction. Dialogs weren’t that great. The visuals of the movie were the real positives in my perspective and Vishnu Sarma truly has a promising career ahead. Edits at times weren’t precise. Music wasn’t that great while the BGM’s showed some standard.
Overall the movie ends up as an average thriller that had the scope to impress you. I am giving it a generous 2.5/5. Escape From Uganda isn’t that deadly as it should have been.

By Aswin Bharadwaj

Founder and editor of Lensmen Reviews.

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