The latest Ranjith Sankar film, Jai Ganesh, starring Unni Mukundan in the lead role, feels like a lazy amalgamation of too many aspirations. Ranjith Sankar is a director who started his career doing movies that had these vigilante justice elements. But when you compare Jai Ganesh and the movies he made in the beginning, there is a clear lack of intent. The graceless making just doesn’t want to refine the content, making the whole movie look like a first draft that should have been rewritten multiple times.
A graphic designer named Ganesh is our central character, and he works in a media house as this poster designer. A bike accident damaged the lower half of Ganesh’s body, and he moves with the aid of a wheelchair now. Ganesh has two other interests. He is an ethical hacker who helps people by providing them with digital evidence, and he is also an ardent comic book fan and has created comic books titled Jai Ganesh. The movie Jai Ganesh is about a kidnapping that happens in the flat where Ganesh stays. How Ganesh gets involved in this case and how he helps the police in solving it is what we see in the film.
Oftentimes when you watch a film, you get a particular instant or concept in it, which you would assume is the germ of the idea that made the writer or director develop it into a script. Jai Ganesh was one movie where you would find it difficult to find that point of spark. Some of the emotional moments that Ranjith Sankar expects to move the audience or give them goosebumps have an extremely outdated syntax on a writing and visualization level. When the hero is getting disturbed every time someone mentions his disability, the staging feels extremely artificial, and rather than feeling for that character, you might end up feeling what’s wrong with this guy.
Two things that were evidently flawed in the case of Jai Ganesh were the writing and the casting. The hero’s affection towards comics is one track, his disability is another one, and then there is this ethical hacker track which makes him somewhat a virtual world Jai Ganesh. The problem is that these layers are not really blending smoothly, and in the final moments of the film, when the script tries to find a parallel between Ganesh and Jai Ganesh, it all feels extremely forceful, and you just don’t feel any sort of goosebumps simply because you have seen better hero elevation pitches. The dialogues are pretty bland in many places. I am no expert in cyber security, but somewhere the hacking track in the whole movie just felt like smart wordplay of a lot of technical words rather than anything practically possible.
Since he is mostly in a wheelchair, the movie becomes quite a physically demanding one for Unni Mukundan, and he was convincing in those climactic portions where the acting was more physical. But in the earlier portions, where the character is angry out of the frustration of being a disabled individual, the performance wasn’t that great, and it felt more like emotionless shouting. Mahima Nambiar’s female lead is an underused and largely irrelevant character whose only purpose was to promote the comic book track of the story. Ravindra Vijay’s vigilante antagonist was also an underused character along with several other characters. Srikanth K Vijayan’s performance as a corrupt politician was forgettable.
In totality, Jai Ganesh is a hastily assembled script that never really bothered about refining sequences to make the experience compelling for the audience. In the last 20 minutes of the movie, when our hero is running from one place to another to save the kid, the intricacy Ranjith Sankar has created feels more like an attempt to create sympathy towards the character. And some of the motivational bits happening in that space, especially the heroine’s phone call and that whole comic book pitching, fell flat and induced only cringe.
In totality, Jai Ganesh is a hastily assembled script that never really bothered about refining sequences to make the experience compelling for the audience.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
