The latest Sreenath Bhasi film, Pongala, is narrated as a flashback with a communist party worker writing in his diary about our hero. The kind of literature in that voice-over was such that you would feel like asking the director, When was the last time you heard something like that in a Malayalam film. The aspiration of Pongala is to become a gangster drama. But the movie is extremely clueless about how to take the story forward, and what you get is a series of unending cliched sequences we have seen in a zillion other movies.
Abhi is our main man, and since his father went missing during his childhood, he was burdened with the responsibility of the family from a very young age. Over time, Abhi became a gangster who was a close aide to a man who dominated the local harbour. What we see here are the conflicts that arise inside this gang and the consequences of that.
When you see the movie, it feels like writer-director A B Binil has these ideas of slow-motion shots, gangster world, complicated love, etc. in his mind. But as I said, when it comes to execution, the ideas are extremely outdated. You have this villain character played by Baburaj barging into the house of a widow to take advantage of her after bribing her mother-in-law to go to a nearby store. The kind of themes and ideas Malayalam cinema perhaps said goodbye to in the ’90s are coming back through this movie, and a lot of the events in the film’s first half are just random tracks of fight and love that barely create an impact.
The second half is perhaps the area where the movie finally manages to have some structure. The story eventually becomes this beta LCU “drug-free society” mission of Abhi. The dialogues they have written for this movie are outdated and hilariously bad. I mean, in the beginning portions of the film, there is a goon who says, “he won’t see sunrise tomorrow.” I mean, I don’t think even ChatGPT would write that. The highly marketed Hanan Shah song is insignificant to the plot. This is projected as a violent action movie, and the quality of the action sequences is terrible. The cinematography doesn’t even try for angles that would conceal the tarpaulin that was on the ground for safety. The background score at one place really sounded like the King of Kotha teaser theme.
In the trailer of the movie, they have tried to present Sreenath Bhasi with a 2.0 tag. But, in terms of the kind of character he has got here and the way he has performed it, there was nothing 2.0 about it. Baburaj plays the role of the main antagonist in his usual style. Like I already said, the dialogues in this movie are so lame, and a lot of the so-called mass dialogues of Baburaj fall in that category. Tamil actor Sampath Ram plays the role of this mafia leader, Tores, who wants to be called Don by everyone, and it is an unintentionally funny character. Yami Sona plays the female lead in this movie, whose reasons for falling in love with the hero make no sense; again, the written lines explaining her love would make you facepalm. Surya Krish, with all the overload of expressions, is disappointing. Murugan Martin gets yet another angry gang member character.
As I said, this whole movie is narrated to us as something written by a character played by actor Sadique. After this dull and generic story of the hero, he tries to conclude it by saying he was betrayed and all. Just like how Bollywood movies are now using patriotism to cover up their creative poverty, this one tries to salvage itself at the end using the Lal Salaam chant and the photos of AKG and Che Guevara. Looking at the way the audience was forced to sit through half an hour of unimaginative fight sequences at the end, when they wrote “Kollam Pakshe Tholppikkan Aavilla”, I was like, shouldn’t I be the one saying that to the filmmakers?
