Oru Kadathu Nadan Kadha

Oru Kadathu Nadan Kadha is only 124 minutes long but it felt like I was inside that theatre for almost half a day. I can confidently say that almost fifty percent of this film can be edited out without any hesitation. The hero Shanu is in a tight situation according to the movie and as a viewer, you will be looking at Shanu as an irresponsible guy who has no basic idea of dealing with a situation.  

Shanu is a young engineering graduate who is struggling to get a job. One day his mother gets injured in an accident and the most obvious cinematic thing happens; one surgery is required and our hero doesn’t have enough money with him for the operation. His friend who is an ex hawala money transporter proposes this shortcut of money-making by transporting illegal money to Kozhikode from Ernakulam and Shanu agrees to do it. As you can already guess, things weren’t smooth and how Shanu completes this mission is the story of the movie.

What I mentioned in the above paragraph is just 20 minutes of the movie, the rest one and half hours has an insufferable amount of sick comedy featuring Biju Kuttan, Noby, Salim Kumar, Praseetha and Sajan Palluruthy. If this bunch of buffoon characters was not enough for you to get a headache, director Peter Sajan makes sure that you will walk out of the theatre with migraine by introducing the character of Ayyappa Baiju pointlessly to the script and giving him irrelevant space in this movie. It was absolutely facepalm moments whenever the face of any actor who does comedy comes on screen. Capturing the hero running through those thin Mumbai slum-like streets is like a template way of establishing the helplessness of the hero and Peter Sajan has squeezed out the complete juice out of Shaheen Siddique by making him run around Kozhikode city.  

As an actor Shaheen Siddique is earnest. But the writing is so darn flat, that you won’t even bother judging someone’s performance. You will be scratching your head seeing Shanu going through ridiculous situations. Salim Kumar is there as a Santosh Pandit fan. Bijukkuttan, Noby, Sajan Palluruthy and Praseetha are competing with one another on who can give the audience the maximum degree of headache. Ghajini fame Pradeep Rawat plays the role of the antagonist named Baba and the character has this theme score that goes “BaaBaa”, which provided unintentional comedy. Abhirav Janan, Savithri Sreedharan, Pradeep Kottayam (small scale annoyance), Sudheer Karamana, Abu Salim, Sasi Kalinga etc are the other prominent names in the cast I could remember.

Remember the old films where these transporters will exchange one half of the currency note to the other guy to verify the person? That tactic is used in this movie as well. I don’t really know how the mechanism of hawala is, but if this is the same system they are using they seriously need to update their standards. The fight sequence at the beach is shoddier than some of the short films and the hero and the goons have zero grace to pull off a stunt sequence. The background score of the movie is lame and the cuts done by the director himself are clumsy. The script of the movie is the worst-case scenario of an underdeveloped script and looking at the way they have introduced bad guys and comedians in the movie, it is quite evident that the effort went into the writing part is very minimal.

If you are a native of Kozhikode, don’t watch Oru Kadathu Nadan Kadha. Along with the annoyance of ridiculous humor and forcefully complicated cliché thriller elements, you have the makers altering the geography of your district. Muthalakkulam is in Beach, Nadakkavu is in Palayam, Railway Station is in Thondayadu and the list goes on and on. There were 10 or 15 people inside the theatre when the show began. By the time the movie got over, there was me, my loneliness, and three other people.

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