Pattaapakal Review | It’s a Comedy of Errors, and That Includes the Movie

A movie like Neram is a combination of comedy of errors in a non-linear narrative. The new Malayalam comedy Pattaapakal is an attempt to create something like that. Sadly, the film’s writer is clueless about how to give solid backgrounds to each track. With lame skit humor eating up a major space of the movie that has a runtime of 1 hour and 45 minutes, Pattaapakal ends up being a creation that just tortures the viewer with its mediocrity.

Narrating the synopsis of this movie is a tough task, as the makers themselves are not sure where to focus. There is a politician whose scandalous video is now in the custody of a goon named Carlos. And Carlos is bargaining with other politicians to make the best of the situation. What we see in the film Pattaapakal, is a series of coincidental accidents, when several other normal people with their set of problems get intertwined in this scenario.

When filmmakers write scripts, there is this method of creating a scene order first and then developing it into a full-fledged nuanced screenplay. In the case of great scripts, you will get to see character detailings, connections, etc., when the scene order gets developed into a proper script. But in the case of trashy films, the writing goes after elements that elongate the scene’s duration and just exposes how lazy the writing is. Pattaapakal easily falls in the second category. The wannabe Alphonse Puthran show-off of director Saajir Sadaf is making way for unnecessary slow motion, gimmicky edits, and on-screen typography.

When it comes to performances, nobody here has any challenging roles to play. Kichu Tellus, as the caricature villain, Carlos, is just okay with making things funny. His henchmen are forgettable annoyances. Ramesh Pisharody gets yet another crooked “Nallavanaya Unni” character. Johny Antony, as always, gets a panicking character. The on-screen image of Johny Antony is such that if I meet him someday rather than a handshake I might directly give him CPR. Krishna Shankar, who appears in the second half, is also playing a role that just feels like a Krishna Shankar role. Gokulan, Sudhy Kopa, Renji Kankol, Vineeth Thattil, etc., are the other names in the cast of this film.

I am someone who believes that certain themes have an expiry date in cinema, and one will have to reinvent that theme to make it appealing to the audience. The non-linear parallel narrative kind of thing that we saw in Neram won’t work today as the audience is exposed to various iterations of that. The writing of PS Arjun takes the audience for granted, and it’s like they have assumed that filling scenes with skit jokes would make the audience forget about the fragileness of the whole script. Songs are squeezed in without any sense. The dialogue is desperately trying to be funny. Shaan Rahman has given his discarded tunes in an end-of-season sale kind of deal for this movie.

The third pointless song in the movie is happening during the end credits, and I walked out during that song and reached my home by 12 PM (The show started at 10 AM) Well, I am talking about the timings because that was the only positive thing about this trashy film. Looking at the kind of used-out humor they depended upon, I was actually hoping one of the characters would fall into a pit of cow dung. But unfortunately, they chose not to do that.