Ira

The movie Ira is produced by Vysakh and Udayakrishna, but it feels like a film directed the former and written by the latter. Well if you are someone who has felt that the making of their movies were fair enough, chances of you calling Ira directed by Saiju SS as an okay one is pretty high. This semi propaganda cliché very rarely impresses you with its novelty.

The forest minister of Kerala, Mr. Chandi, who was under allegations of corruption, dies due to heart attack and later it was realized that it was a murder. Junior doctor Aryan is the accused and he claims himself as innocent. The movie shows us the investigation process by officer Rajeev which examines the past of each character.

It starts off on a slightly interesting note and then becomes a propaganda that looks desperate. And the entire second half of the film is somewhat an over ambitious unreal execution of a series of events. The kind of twists, turns and character revealing one get to see here isn’t surprising at all. Within a few moments into the introduction of characters played by Unni Mukundan and Miya, one can easily guess who they are and the movie lingers around that suspense as if it was way too intelligent. And the climax sequences feels like they want to look fresh, but sounds too typical or exaggerated.

There is no end to the struggle of Unni Mukundan to pronounce Malayalam correctly. The actor does know to carry swagger, but his acting, especially in emotional scenes is still not there. Gokul Suresh Gopi’s similarities with his dad were more evident in this film and I found that interesting. Miya was okay in the role offered to her. The elaborate cast of the film has a lot of names like Alencier Ley Lopez, Shankar Ramakrishnan, Niranjana, Lena, Saju Navodaya, Marina Michael, Kailash and a lot more and none of them belonged to the memorable category.

Saiju SS is the director of the film and his making style is pretty similar to the way directors like Joshy and Vysakh treat these kinds of films; you know the ones where a car going at a normal speed without urgency stops by applying sudden break. Naveen John’s script starts off as an ambitious attempt to use the murder mystery idea. But his script gets restricted by a lot of factors. The customized justice theme against the harassment against women is now becoming an escape tool for lazy film making. Here also they are trying to give a structure to the story be adding all those back stories and revenge ideas. The cinematography is unimpressive with tight frames and John Kutty is struggling sometimes to shape it into a good sequence. The background score from Gopi Sundar was actually an altered version of what he composed for Anwar.

At the end, Ira is not going to stay in your head as it lacks freshness. There is a sequence where one character tapes the conversation between three other characters. And one of the characters who are getting taped is without a reason is calling everyone including himself by name as if he knows somebody listening to this secretly needs to know their names. Hope that sort of clarifies the intelligence of the script.

Rating: 2/5