LLB Review | A Bland Sentimental Package With Heavily Outdated Cliches

The new Sreenath Bhasi film LLB has this tagline – Life Line of Bachelors. The connection of the movie with LLB will make you feel cheated, the same way some of the students of Zamorins Guruvayurappan College, who attended the show I watched, felt hoping to watch them on screen. Directed by AM Sidhique, LLB is a mixture of outdated cliches that you can just predict from a distance. With the script having no balance on how much time to invest in relevant and inconsequential events, this one is a bland sentimental package.

Sibi and Salman have come to Kozhikode from Kasaragod to join a college for LLB. As freshers, they struggle to get a rented house, and when they eventually get a house, they decide to make Sanju, their classmate with poor financial backup, a part of the squad. The campus life of the gang gets into a tricky situation when a case in which Sibi and Salman were a part gets investigated again. That case and its connections with our main characters is what we see in LLB.

SPOILER ALERT! The movie is basically an extremely old-fashioned revenge story. The moment the doctor reveals certain details about Sanju, you get to know the major twist in the film. After that, you are hoping that AM Sidhique will come up with something that is genuinely going to create some emotional conflicts. But, no surprises here as well, and we are given even cheesier versions of cliches in the backstories that follow. The eye transplant scripting trope in the climax felt like an insult to those who may have mumbled the word cliche during the movie.

Sreenath Bhasi, as Sibi, slips into his typical style of unreasonable anger at many points in the film, and whenever he tries to make Sibi sound like a simple guy, the performance feels forceful. Vishak Nair, as the womanizer Salman, is quite unbearable with his overdoing of the “Kozhi” characteristic. I mean, he could have told the director that folks like Salman are not this unsubtle. Aswath Lal is the only guy who has got a character that actually had some scope to perform. But even he is struggling in some areas due to the sloppy writing. Anoop Menon, who appears in the last 15 minutes of the movie, has a, or I should rather say, tries a Kozhikode accent and fails miserably. Seema G Nair, Kottayam Ramesh, Sudheesh, Sreejith Ravi, Manoj KU, etc., are the major names in the cast.

The cluelessness of the scripting is quite evident from scene one itself. There is a pointless campus song sequence at the beginning of the movie, featuring Oru Adaar Love fame Roshan Abdul Raoof. Then you have the usual drill of campus movie elements, which all get forgotten almost instantly. The entire first half of this movie is just a marketing gimmick to make it look like a campus film, and the making is so terrible that it feels like Gen Z is being controlled by a director whose last encounter with campus was Kamal’s Nammal. The romantic track is one of the most hilarious ones in the movie. The socially aware heroine falls for our charmless hero just like that. They are trying to show that the rapport of the two men with the teachers and other people on the campus is pretty cool, making you wonder why all that was necessary for the movie if the story was like this.

LLB feels like the director’s dream when he watched some campus movie in the late ’90s or early 2000. The cinematic sensibilities are very much stuck in that era, and when that clashes with the cliches of that period, you get a two-hour-long nostalgia package you never asked for.