Revolver Rinko, the new movie from director Kiran Narayanan, starts off with these montages about the musical legacy of Kozhikode, and then it gradually goes towards the home cinema culture and the Mappila Paattu boom. But once the movie enters its core idea of creating an indie superhero movie, all this backdrop-building about the culture of Kozhikode becomes irrelevant. Mounted as a feel-good film with a movie-within-a-movie structure, Revolver Rinko is a film that runs out of ideas way too quickly and depends heavily on the typical Vishnu Unnikrishnan gags to feel like a comical entertainer.
Priyesh, a man who directs these album songs and home movies, is our hero. His nephew one day comes to him with a request to make an indie movie that is an adaptation of Minnal Murali, a film that is very special to his nephew’s close friend, who recently went through a personal tragedy. How Priyesh, his friends, and these kids manage to pull off this seemingly impossible task is what we see in Revolver Rinko.
When the first look was announced, it felt like they were making a superhero movie. When the trailer dropped, they made it clear that it is a movie about making a superhero movie. And when the movie was released, it became even clearer that the movie had less movie-making and more gag humor to fill the hollow script. The problem precisely lies in how the writing of this movie gets stuck. It is creating characters and subplots for no major reason. There is a scene in a badminton court where the shuttlecock goes missing. There is also a scene where the hero thinks the money he kept for the movie’s shooting was stolen. Both these scenes have zero significance in the story, and I don’t understand why the editor kept those scenes.
Kiran Narayanan, who previously made the Lenaa starrer Oru Visheshapetta Biriyani Kissa, has this basic idea of depicting the struggles of someone who tries to make a small movie with budget constraints. It is actually a great premise to make the audience aware of the numerous processes that happen behind the scenes of each movie. However, instead of exploring those possibilities, this movie is simply going after familiar tropes of humor and sentiment. The tracks they have added to show the financial difficulties of the hero feel generic. The half-baked love story is pointless from the word go, and the Uncle track featuring Lalu Alex and the jokes around that character just expose the lack of ideas in this script. You are basically sitting through a dry script that just throws in easily replaceable tracks in the form of subplots.
Vishnu Unnikrishnan is playing, yet another Vishnu Unnikrishnan character, and the only difference is that occasionally he tries to crack the Kozhikode dialect. I won’t really blame him for that, as the script itself depends entirely on the actor to add anything to that character. Sreepath plays the role of the nephew Puli, and he was okay in that role. Binu Thrikkakkara and Vijilesh play these supporting characters in the same way they have been playing characters throughout their careers. Lalu Alex seems to have signed up for the Vishnu Unnikrishnan job assurance package, and the role he has got in this movie is a nothing character that rarely adds anything to the script. Anjali Nair, Mareena Michael, Saju Navodya, Shiny Sarah, etc., are some of the other cast members of this movie.
The germ of the idea of Revolver Rinko might well be an earnest one. However, the script development part is evidently lazy. There is a grandfather character who always sleeps, a moneylender who humiliates the hero’s sister, and a parent character who works in Mumbai and occasionally comes to Kerala to threaten the hero. All these characters are added for the sake of extending the runtime with useless scenes, and the movie in totality feels like a bloated thought with wafer-thin creativity. Revolver Rinko is one of those sloppy films that uses good intentions as an excuse to escape criticism.
