According to most people being a critic/reviewer is an easy job as you are very promptly and easily judging someone’s effort that might have took years to shape up. But then there are some movies that will earn you respect when you tell people that you sat through the entire film in a theater. Sakalakalashala directed by Vinod Guruvayoor is one such personal achievement for me which I can show off in front of people as a certificate of my tolerance level.
Akbar aka Akku is our hero. He is the Indian version of Elon Musk and has always worked hard for his college in the tech fest. Sakalakalashala shows us a lot of trashy scenes and then Akku’s latest discovery which leads to the conflict of the movie. A good-hearted Akku is misunderstood as a criminal and Sakalakalashala shows us how he proves his innocence.
The very first scene and its “comedy” should be taken as a warning that this movie will be harmful to your mental health. It is one movie you will cringe through its entire runtime. It is one movie where the writers have made up stuff on the day of shooting. It is one movie that doesn’t know that 19 years have gone since 2000. In the climax, Renji Panicker speaks about the greatness of the youth by talking about their participation in the recent floods and I thought if the makers decided to donate the money which was used to make this film to the flood-affected people that would have made much sense. The bank robbery sequences and the logic applied to make the hero helpless etc are annoying to the core.
Niranj as an actor doesn’t have the grace or charm to be the hero here. His expressions are limited and just doesn’t have the charm to make us root for his character (No, you are not reading the review of Irupathiyonnam Noottaandu). Manasa Radhakrishnan is also equally bad in being Mumtaz. Her character is a college student and a journalist at the same time and as it isn’t the only thing that doesn’t make any sense in this movie I don’t want to get into that. Somebody should give Jacob Gregory better roles. Dharmajan is there for the usual reason plus a hilarious twist which offered the audience unintended comedy towards the end. Tini Tom is credited as a creative contributor and I would really love to know his contribution to the movie other than acting. Hareesh Kanaran, Shammi Thilakan, Nirmal Palazhi, Ramesh Thilak etc are there and I am pretty sure most of them will be regretting the decision to act in this film.
Vinod Guruvayoor who previously directed Shikhamani and earlier scripted Prithviraj’s Hero is clueless about how to package this idea (if you can call it an idea) into a movie. The first half has too much of songs coming out of nowhere and I could hear the guy in front of me predicting the arrival of a song. The first half is a mix of senseless and useless college campus scenes and songs. The second half has a bank robbery case associated with the script which also looks funny and pathetic looking at the way it has been visualized. There is a serious climax fight sequence involving Dharmajan in the movie and I would really like to meet the creative genius behind that scene and show him the famous Vekkeda Vedi part of Padmashree Dr. Saroj Kumar. Technically the quality of the movie is really mediocre.
Sakalakalashala is one movie where the audience has taken more effort and strain than the filmmakers. Actually, I like these kinds of films as a reviewer. It is so bad that I can confidently say that no section of the audience will like it. It is one movie where you won’t be mad at the person next to you if he is playing games on his mobile phone.
Rating: 0.5/5
It is so bad that I can confidently say that no section of the audience will like it. It is one movie where you won’t be mad at the person next to you if he is playing games on his mobile phone.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
