Johny Johny Yes Appa

Joji Thomas is the man who wrote the hit satirical comedy Vellimoonga. It was a movie that sort of stayed true to its genre and never really tried to be a package. When it comes to his second movie Johny Johny Yes Appa, directed by G Marthandan, the script is depending on humor to stay alive rather than for the sake of the story. Thus the overall impact of Johny Johny Yes Appa isn’t that impressive and with that excruciatingly long second half, the movie feels a bit too dragged too.

So Johny is the second son of his father. He is a crooked brain who is working in the church as an assistant but has an alternate life which nobody knows. His father thinks that Johny is the best among his children. How an event changes this perception about Johny and how he goes through that phase is what the story of Johny Johny Yes Appa is.

The second half of the movie is entirely an isolated idea when compared to the first half. The first half of the movie is in a way a rehash of Joji’s own Vellamoonga. Crooked hero, cool priest, village textured characters etc are there and because there wasn’t a Vellimoonga like comedy after that, you won’t feel any sense of boredom in those jokes. But the problem is with the second half where the movie forgets everything till that point. At one point I thought the movie will have to do something with the hero’s love life. But the second half has pretty much nothing concerned with the heroine and her life and the only bit that was there felt like some kind of track comedy featuring Shajon and Abu Salim.

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G Marthandan has this outdated style of crafting scenes and you can see him getting saved in the first half purely because of the dialogues. When the film reaches the second half even Joji Thomas is struggling to keep things tidy. A new track opens up and the characters behave like they were not even the ones we saw in the first half. There was a scene where Johny calls his brothers and becomes emotional and determined and I was like what happened to this guy? The movie almost feels like one of those template movies which would have worked 10 years back. The emotional shift of the movie was really awkward and the script lingers on to that in a very cheesy way. And that was terribly disappointing considering how Joji and Jibu Jacob remolded the old structure in the Biju Menon starrer. The music was fine while I found the Johny Johny background score ridiculously funny.

Kunchako Boban yet again chooses a character that is very familiar to his on-screen image. And in some of the emotional scenes in the second half, he couldn’t make it look convincing and the man was covering his face as if to cover up the flaws. I actually loved the performance and character of Anu Sithara in this film. The disobedient and equally crooked character was performed smartly by the actress and I really wished this movie was more about her character and Johny rather than that unimpressive past story. Sharafudheen and Tini Tom as the brothers were fine and Sharafudheen with his dubbing counters scores greatly. Vijayaraghavan was okay and Geetha makes a comeback with a character that doesn’t have much to do. Sanoop plays a pivotal character in the movie but he loses grip when the film goes to those sentimental phases. Kalabhavan Shajon is there just for the sake of comedy. After a considerable gap, Lena is seen in this film and Mamta Mohandas appears in an extended cameo.

Johny Johny Yes Appa had the scope to be that passable entertainer. But the second half of the movie chose a path that’s pretty outdated in terms of writing, making and even acting and bored me terribly. That phase was so long that you might even forget that Sharafudheen actually made you laugh a lot in the first half.

Rating: 2/5