School Bus

The intention is to preach the parents about the relevance of having a good communication with their kids. In a way it succeeds in conveying the idea, but the path taken is a bit too grand and a little hard to convince.

Ajoy and Angelina are siblings who study in the same school. Ajoy is a bit on the naughty side and has got caught many times for disciplinary actions. The film basically revolves around one such disciplinary action and it’s after-effects which leads to a huge problem.

For a minute I thought the movie was heading towards a tragic end but predictably the film had its ending on a happy note. For the kind of message it tried to convey I sort of felt that tragedy would have been a better way to be hard hitting. May be because of a children’s movie aspect they decided not to take that risk. The main issue I could sense is in the second half proceedings of the story. The whole forest episode along with some unconvincing visual effects efforts makes the movie look way too ambitious and extremely dramatic. The first half of the movie sort of achieves what it was trying to pitch.

Rosshan Andrews starts off the film in an interesting way. But as the narrative proceeds, he couldn’t create that required intrigue. The story credit of the movie is shared by the director along with Bobby and Sanjay. You can clearly see the Rosshan Andrews imagination element in the story. It lacks flare and depth. By over digging the forest sequences the film moves away from the main focus. Screenplay in the beginning portions have included most of the problems faced by kids in these days, but that relatable feel in terms of emotions gets lost in the second half. Cinematography was good especially in those second half forest sequences. Edits and BGM were nice. The visual effects weren’t that great.

The dialogues are a bit too dramatic for the two new kids Aakash and Angelina. I thought the roles for Jayasurya, Kunchako Boban and Aparna Gopinath would be very brief. But surprisingly they have got a good amount of onscreen time in the film and among them I would say Jayasurya got the better character and delivered an impressive performance. Rest of the cast was also okay.

So to sum it up, I would say School Bus is an average preachy movie which might work for some percentage of parents. It has an interesting first half that addresses the conflict of the film, but the ambitious imagination of the second half doesn’t really work in favour of the School Bus.

Rating : 2.5/5