Happy Journey

The biggest challenge for director Boban Samuel’s new film Happy Journey is the fact that 1983 is still running in the theaters. Its not that both the films are exactly the same, but the sports and inspiration factor that exists in both the films bring on the comparison meter. The idea of Happy Journey is quite a sincere one, but the movie severely lacks the inspiration element. Some scattered humor in the first half, one memorable back story and also the performance of Jayasurya makes this movie a watchable one.

Its the journey of Aron who became blind after a tragic accident in his childhood. The cricket loving Aron was then focusing on the cricket for blind people. But the cruel faith always took his chances to reach a better position in that sport many times in many forms. The story basically is about the challenges that Aron had to face in his way to become a cricketer.

The first 15-20 minutes of the movie somewhere looks like a quick summary of 1983. After that the movie enters the “blind” episode. The usual formulas which we see in these kinds of movies are present here; but with a good mix of humor through the characters played by Balu and junior Raveendran of Idukki Gold (sorry I don’t know his name) the first half of the movie is enjoyable. Much like Arunlal’s previous scripts here also many of the major back stories(especially the one of coach Gopinathan) are quite brittle. The diversion created using Madhupal’s doctor character was unnecessary and the character portrayed by Aparna Gopinath looked all too unrealistic. Most of the times the challenges set in the beginning doesn’t really get an attention. In between all these a decent story is conveyed and some of the dialogues and sentiments are worth applauding especially the one surrounding Chemban Vinod Jose’s character.

Jayasurya once again saves a movie from a possible zone of uninspiring boredom with his genuine performance. The mannerisms of a blind guy and the goodness inside such people were conveyed quite impressively by the actor. Lal’s character cant be said as challenging, but he was a good choice as a coach. Balu did his macha/bro part nicely. All the actors who played the blind characters were good and Chemban Vinod Jose was my favorite. Lena was also really good.

In terms of making, it was nice to see Boban Samuel experimenting with the visual narration in the beginning. Even though they were not perfect, those sequences where you will see Lena’s Alice looking at the newspaper again and again out of joy was something I never expected from a Boban Samuel film. The script as I said finds it hard to explain many things. Some of the dialogues written for our central protagonist were really good. Cinematography was good. BGM and music from Gopi Sundar also kept a standard.

Overall Happy Journey is not a boring movie. But what it supposed to do was to make us feel for the characters and join their achievement, which sadly didn’t happened. The marks for the movie from my side is 2.5/5. Jayasurya scores as the script got stumped.