Praise The Lord

The film opens to a chaos of technical mistakes starting from the painfully mixed song and a Goa sequence where you can clearly see two Suresh Krishnas. The intention of the makers of Praise the lord is to create some humor on the silver screen with the unique characters they have in the story. But unfortunately only a few scenes and some reactions of Mammootty was able to create the fun and the basic idea just got weaker with a script that can’t bring any special charm to the light hearted comedy.

The central protagonist is Joy, a rich man from Pala living with his wife and two kids happily in the middle of his rubber estate. The slightly over romantic Joy gets into a situation where a young couple comes to his house through his close friend Sunny for a few days of hiding from their family. The weird couple is in Joy’s house because of the disagreements their families have over this relationship. How Joy manages to protect them from the outer world without letting anyone knowing that two people in such a situation is there in his family is the idea behind Praise The Lord.

A guy who hasn’t seen a real life romantic couple will be definitely curious to know about them. Such a curious person meeting a really weird couple is the ignition point of the unique fun that Praise The lord has to offer and it does have a scope for a good comedy. Where the movie derails is in creating sequences that are really witty. The screenplay constantly builds up something which looks fresh but after some time they brutally insults their own creativity.  The Romeo side of Joy and his advice to Sam Kutti in the climax were the two things that were able to please me. The movie’s success relied upon the treatment rather than the fairly predictable climax (the twist wasn’t a real surprise) and the lack of juice in the making makes the movie an unimpressive one.

On screen, Mammootty’s acting was really good. We haven’t seen him in a similar avatar and Joy never looked like an exaggerated Romeo. Reenu Mathews couldn’t become that wife who needed a sort of courage. Looking at the past performances of Ahmed Sidhique I don’t find his inclusion as surprising. The annoyance both him and Akansha Puri’s character created in my mind was something that I can’t call as the success of their acting skills (The characters were supposed to be weird). Mukesh and Joy Mathew did their roles nicely. He wasn’t used much, but still Shajon was good as the blinking priest. An irrelevant role for Suresh Krishna.

The making side of the movie is a total let down. Shibu Gangadharan couldn’t bring the humor with his direction style. I haven’t read the book written by Paul Zacharia, so I am not going to make the statement that the film did injustice to the book. As an independent script it couldn’t create situations with correct impulse. Hasty ideas were used for introducing the characters and the change in attitude of characters towards the conclusion wasn’t explained clearly. The dialogues are partially cliched. Cinematography was nice. Music wasn’t impressive and the two songs were placed awkwardly. In fact many people left the theatre during that second song which had this roman warrior costumes and all. Background score was poor. The editing was pathetic and it really looked like those films were the censor board did some cuts.

So Praise The Lord is a disappointing film. Mammootty’s performance, some scattered humor and also the fact that there is no melodrama gives some positives to this movie which had a really good seed which was amateurishly treated. My rating is a generous 2/5 for Praise The Lord. People screaming “Halleluiah” and “Praise the Lord” after the film was much fun than the movie.