Thoppil Joppan

The best word to describe Thoppil Joppan would be lazy. Thoppil Joppan from Johny Antony is a movie written in a very lazy way, just to include a lot of dialogue humor. With a wayward plot getting muddled over by lackluster writing, this Mammootty starrer’s only positive is probably the comeback of Salim Kumar in his signature comedy role.

Thoppil Joppan is this bachelor from Thoprankudi who once loved a girl named Annie. The jobless status forced him to move to Mumbai to earn a living, but by the time he came back it was too late and Annie got engaged to someone else. This disappointment made him a drunkard and Joppan decided not to get married. The film Thoppil Joppan is trying to show us some incidents that ended up in the marriage of Joppan after going through a lot of events. Man! It is hard to summarize without revealing when there isn’t anything much inside the movie!

Nishad Koya who has written films like Ordinary, Poly technique and Madhuranaranga has this knack of including memorable humorous dialogues in his creations. But when it comes to Thoppil Joppan there is no real shape to the story. The script is desperately searching for points to create caricature level comedy and with Johny Antony overdoing most of those, Thoppil Joppan becomes a disturbance at some areas. The way the script moves forward doesn’t give you much of an idea on what progress is happening in the movie. It becomes a little bit boring when the SMS jokes start to appear as dialogues.

On screen, I will have to say that there were portions even someone like Mammootty couldn’t convince the audience with the comedy. Mamtha Mohandas as the vivacious Maria was okay and Andrea Jeremiah doesn’t have much of an acting to do here. The friends circle of Joppan portrayed by Alencier,  Sohan Seenulal, Sreejith Ravi and Saju Navodhya were pretty good in giving all those hilarious counter dialogues. It was good to see veteran faces like Kaviyoor Ponnamma and Harishree Ashokan. Jude Anthany Joseph once again gets a chance to portray an annoying character. Like I mentioned in the beginning, Salim Kumar makes a solid comeback through this film. It’s been a while we have seen him in his typical comedy avatar.

Johny Antony’s making has no sign of improvement. His way of depicting comedy and melodrama on screen is still the same. The placing of songs and the kind of jokes they tried to infuse within them looked very tacky. The aimlessness of the plot somewhat gets fixed in the second half where we finally get an idea on what exactly is the conflict of the movie. Pointless subplots also pop in there in the form of Joppan bringing a drunkard man to a de addiction center after hearing his daughter’s sorrows. I like the spoofing they did towards the end of the movie making fun of the kind of cheesy endings we have seen in dramatic love stories. Music from Vidyasagar wasn’t a memorable one.

Thoppil Joppan is just around two hours in terms of runtime and that’s a big relief as the movie is largely pondering without a subject to address. If sporadic dialogue jokes are what you looking for in a comedy film, Joppan may offer you fun.

Rating : 2/5