Hello Dubaikkaran

In the movie Hello Dubaikkaran, there is a scene where a lodge owner is asking a wannabe film maker about the story of the movie he wants to make. The story is so terrible that the lodge owner tells him that the first person to cry at the end of the film would be the producer of the film. Now the irony is that the character of the director is played by the co-director of the film Harishree Yousuf and by the end of this film I also found myself having the same opinion of the lodge owner about this movie.

Prakashan is a young man who aspires to be a Dubai NRI as this idea got planted in his head when he saw the warm welcoming and respect one person got during his childhood. But his attempts to go to Dubai weren’t happening and the guy got really frustrated as people made fun of him. The film basically talks about this journey of Prakashan to achieve his goal.

Harishree Yousuf and Harisri Baburaj are the makers of this film and Yousuf is the writer of the movie. We have seen Yousuf in many comedy programs and also in comical roles in several movies. It seems like his idea of constructing a story is also associated with what he used to do on screen. The situations are abundant in clichés and the humor is forced into the viewer. From pervert jokes to WhatsApp forwards, what they have included in the script as humor very rarely works. After suffering enough mediocrity I was hoping the movie would head towards the obvious climax, but the director duo seems to be huge fans of Priyadarshan and they decided to extend the movie almost by 15 – 20 minutes by incorporating confusion, chaos jokes.

Adil Ibrahim made a really good impression when I first noticed him in Nirnayakam. Even in that brief role in Rockstar, he looked graceful. But here he seems to be struggling to get the beat of the movie. And that isn’t entirely his fault as the film is also struggling to have a proper tone. Sunil Sukhada was fine in his role. Salim Kumar’s style doesn’t really work as the movie itself has the same nature. Dharmajan has a brief role with the usual set of dialogues. Malavika Menon also doesn’t have much to do here. The actor who played the role of that Pokkiri Raja style villain offered a lot of unintentional comedy (is he the producer?). Balachandran Chullikkadu is too naive and Sivaji Guruvayoor has gone hyper. God knows the need of the characters played by Kottayam Naseer, Indrans etc.

The director duo seems to have no real interest in creating a novel story. Their plan is to make it a comedy entertainer, but the path taken to make it a comedy entertainer was an extremely outdated one that takes the audience for granted. Up to a point it was somewhat bearable. But after almost 2 hours in to the film there were some humor tracks which made no sense and there is a climax twist which made me do a facepalm. The camera work and the cuts were really sloppy. The background score and music were poor too. BTW I have never seen such a spacious flight.

Hello Dubaikkaran will be watchable if you are still finding Comedy Stars in Asianet as a really good show. Because this movie is almost like watching 5 or 6 episodes of that program back to back (including the songs sung by Jagadeesh).

Rating: 1/5