Marco Review | A Hollow Blood-Bath Mashup of Animal and KGF With Appreciable Production Quality

In Marco, the latest Haneef Adeni film, at one point, the antagonist is telling Marco something along the lines, “I appreciate your valor, but I am really sorry about your brain.” This is something that you will also feel while watching the methods of this character in the movie. Marketed as the most violent film in the history of Malayalam cinema, Marco is indeed living up to that promise. But is there a purpose to that violence that will make us root for the hero when he unleashes himself? Well, the answer won’t be a confident yes for most of the people who have seen the film. Marco is a film that tries to cover up the flaws of a generic revenge drama by bombarding everything with maximum violence. The only thing that felt like a bright patch from the whole movie was realizing the fact that, as an industry, Malayalam has the capacity to produce great action films. We just lack the craft to write them.

The movie has no connection with Adeni’s first collaboration with Nivin Pauly, Mikhael. They have just used that character in an entirely different story. So, the story is set against the backdrop of a gold smuggling syndicate. Our hero, Marco’s elder brother, is a prominent name in that syndicate. At one point, Marco’s younger brother gets murdered, and that prompts him to return to Kerala. What we see in Marco is the investigation Marco does on his own to find the culprits behind the death of his brother.

I am not against violence being shown on screen. I am someone who has enjoyed the John Wick saga and the recent Hindi film Kill. All these films had the same idea of one man going against an army of bad guys because they did something that caused them a huge personal wound. While the other films did that with extreme realism and rawness, Marco is trying to stylize it way too much. The lines are clunky in many areas, and it felt like if the movie had less dialogue, the intended mass euphoria would have been there. Some of you may have seen this troll video from the movie Prajapathi where Mammootty uses the famous dialogue from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, “When you are going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” And the next moment, he gets shot. The structuring of some of the sequences in Marco is like that.

As I said in the beginning, Marco gives you a sense of promise when you look at the production quality of the film. The cinematography of Chandru Selvaraj is truly brilliant. He blends style with craft to attain some of the high moments in the film, and even the prosthetic makeup and the visual effects part of this movie are also brilliant. It’s just that the writing is extremely weak, and it is hiding its weakness by creating set pieces that are deliberately designed to make things uncomfortable for the viewer. RDX is also a movie that has a trigger point when a kid gets assaulted. In Marco, the scale of that trigger point is much much higher. Yet you are forced to whistle when the hero changes his attire and dress rather than when he kills the people who did the ugly stuff.

With invisible cuts in fight sequences, Shameer Muhammed really helps some of the set pieces stand out. Ravi Basrur’s music is very much in the KGF kind of loud zone, and for the texture of this movie, it works. Haneef Adeni wants to cater to the youth who want to have whistle-worthy moments in the theater, and every set piece that is clearly inspired by various films is designed to make it a theatrical experience. But some of these sequences of brutality are exhausting after a point, and just like every other action film made in India post-Kaithi, the M134 Minigun makes an appearance in this one also.

Physique and believable portrayal of violence are the basic demands of this movie from the hero, and Unni Mukundan delivers on those aspects. When it comes to delivering lines, his dialogue rendering is not that great. In fact, except for Siddique and Jagadish, nobody else in the movie was able to deliver the dialogue assigned to them. The rest of the cast, especially the antagonists, were forced to say dramatic Malayalam dialogues, and it had no fire in them.

The romantic life of Marco in this movie is an on-and-off thing, and in one sequence, when the heroine calls him toxic, he says that this toxicity and obsession is his form of love, and he guarantees her that even though they are not in a relationship he will protect her. I mean, such a Sandeep Reddy Vanga thing to say. Marco is basically a crude mashup of Animal and KGF that tries to shut you by soaking everything in blood.