LavaKusha

Even when the plot of the film stays very thin, what makes LavaKusha passable is the irreverent fun in the scenes. Written by actor Neeraj Madhav and directed by Gireesh Mano who earlier made Nee Ko Nja Cha, LavaKusha isn’t a boring cinema. But at the same time the kind of predictability in the screenplay and the somewhat exhausting length of the movie pull it back.

Our title protagonists who are never addressed by their names in the film are two youngsters who basically don’t have a proper job. They met each other at Chennai to buy alcohol. When they both decided to come back to Kerala, the return journey in the train became an eventful one. The incidents that happened in that journey gave them a lot of contacts and confidence. Eventually both of them became part of a secret operation and how these losers manage to complete that mission is what this fun film trying to show us.

Neeraj Madhav as a writer tries to spoof the clichés we see in movies. There is a scene in the movie where his character Lavan talks fearlessly at gun point and we later realize that the guts he showed in that scene were fake. This kind of humor is happening frequently in LavaKusha. What it does to the movie is that we don’t look too much into the level of nonsense in the content. Ample time is spent on setting up these two characters. The Tamil movie inspired drunkard song introduction and numerous other subplots in the film just to establish the hopelessness of these characters wasn’t really that pleasing in my view.

The chemistry of Neeraj Madhav and Aju Varghese is an impressive one. As both are almost always together in the film, the humor isn’t really annoying and the sort of irreverent fun I mentioned in the beginning works in favor of the film because of this combination’s comic timing. Biju Menon is pretty convincing as the police officer character that has shades of seriousness and humor. The fight between Deepthi Sati’s performance and dubbing will go on. Vijay Babu and Major Ravi were good in their characters.

Gireesh Mano who earlier made Nee Ko Nja Cha keeps LavaKusha too in the same zone of humor. He isn’t trying to make it serious at any point and that is a good thing looking at the way Neeraj has written it. The elaborateness in writing is the weak link in Neeraj Madhav’s script. Once I finished the film and backtracked all the events, I thought this movie could have been trimmed at least by half an hour if they weren’t desperate to make it a comedy movie. Even with these flaws in the content there is humor in the scenes that will keep you occupied and if that hadn’t happened, it would have been a torture considering the 151 minutes of runtime. The cinematography and cuts are decent. The background score complimented the mood of the movie. It was good to hear Munna’s song again, but there wasn’t really a need for such a song in that situation.

LavaKusha is a passable fun film that doesn’t have much of a novelty to its credit. Loosely inspired from Hollywood film 21 Jump Street, this film is a little too convoluted and comical.

Rating: 2.5/5