Maharani Review | An Unremarkable Comedy With a Bloated and Dragged Script

There is a scene in the second half of the movie, Maharani, where the hero Viji tries to find out where the leading lady Rani is, and the hilarious loop in that conversation actually cracked me up. Even the audience inside the theater, who weren’t responding till that point also laughed out loud for that sequence. Written by Ratheesh Ravi and directed by G Marthandan, the aspiration of this comedy was to create a series of similar witty moments. Sadly, a major percentage of the jokes kind of stick out, and the movie feels like a compilation of forgettable confusion jokes that never really blended smoothly with the main thread.

The movie revolves around these two brothers Aji and Viji. Their father is somewhat supportive of all their activities, while the mother is not really happy about their lazy approach to life. Things take an interesting turn when Aji’s plan to elope with his girlfriend Kavya Madhavan, with the help of his brother and father, gets messed up because of one of the affairs of Viji, with a girl named Rani. What Rani did and how that affects Viji and his family is what you get to watch in Maharani.

The core idea of the movie has this element where this golddigger playboy gets into a messed up situation because of his attitude that disregards women. But in order to develop that idea into a comedy, Ratheesh Ravi is struggling to create organic layers to the script. A lot of events that happen in the movie’s initial areas have this track-comedy kind of feel where you sort of sense a desperation from Marthandan and Ratheesh to make things funny. More than the writing, I would say, it was the helplessness we see in Roshan Matthew’s portrayal of Viji, that made the interval block somewhat funny.

You can’t really see any directorial enhancement happening to the script on a making level, and the visuals are pretty standard, and the scenes are captured in an old-school way. What I sort of hated the most about this movie was the background score, which was kind of excessive, and you can again sense the desperation to make scenes funny if you listen to those sounds they have created to give a cue to the audience on where to laugh. The fundamental flaw is in the writing that can’t really construct an exciting graph to this comedy to keep us engaged.

Roshan Matthew, as Vijeesh aka Viji, has tried to make that character a believable womanizer with a fluent performance. But it is tough to be convincing in those forcefully comical scenes. Shine Tom Chacko, as the elder brother Aji, is trying to make his character funnier through a lot of physical gestures and body movements, and it felt pretty odd rather than funny. Johny Antony plays the father’s role in his typical style while Nisha Sarang yet again plays a screaming mother. Harishree Ashokan, Jaffar Idukki, Balu Varghese, Kailash, Ashwath Lal, etc., are the other major names in the cast, along with Lizabeth Tomy as Rani with zero sync with the dubbed voice of Angel Shijoy.

Maharani is a movie where I didn’t even feel it could have been a better movie if they had tweaked something here and there. It was a very fragile plot, and many of the conflicts and confusion in the film don’t make sense as most of it could have had easy solutions. The entire satire track that intended to mock caste got misfired. To sum it up, G Marthandan’s Maharani is a dragged comedy that failed miserably to utilize its stellar cast.