Tsunami

Tsunami, the new movie directed by Lal and his son Jean-Paul Lal aka Lal Jr., seems like a film they did just because they wanted to be on a film set. Off late, the movies that Lal wrote felt more like a series of skit jokes in stories that are wafer-thin. And Tsunami is no exception. It does have a central idea around which the movie is built, but the stretching that is happening here is equivalent to how much one can stretch a chewed bubble gum.

Okay, I tried to draft a synopsis of this movie twice, and it just didn’t make any sense. A severely under-confident guy gets married to a girl with whom he has an awkward history which she doesn’t know. How this awkward past interaction causes unwanted confusion in their married life is what you get to see in Tsunami (Now go and watch the trailer).

If your idea of watching a fun movie is like watching back-to-back scenes that felt like performances in those TV channel comedy shows, then Tsunami is a perfect entertainer for you. For me, it felt more like drunk people’s comedy. If you have ever sat soberly among drunk people, you will know what I mean. They will just pick a word or a totally random situation and laugh at it so hard that they might force themselves to believe that it is funny. The jokes in Tsunami are just like that.

With his confusion and tensions, Balu Varghese would remind you of Lal in some of his earlier movies. Aju Varghese has done his usual bit here as well. Innocent is occasionally funny and mostly stiff. Aradhya Ann, the leading lady, doesn’t have much to do here. The only actor whom I found genuinely funny in this entire movie was Mukesh. He understood the comedy’s pitch and that sort of reduced the mediocrity of those pointless scenes considerably.

Lal, who has written the story, screenplay, and dialogues of this movie, tries to add more and more confusions to create an entertainer. The misleading strategy of the script sometimes doesn’t make any sense. Then he infuses some of the U Certificate sex comedy metaphors into this content that is already struggling to create scenes. When you sit through sequences like the first night conversation between father-in-law and son-in-law and the priest uncle’s advice, you will be able to sense the scarcity of idea or that hasty decision to make a cinema. And it was a bit sad to see the recurring fair skin glorification and the “toin” transgender comedy even in these times. Neha S Nair and Yakzan Gary Pereira have opted for a different music style, and the music review was available in the lyrics of that first song.

At one point, I thought Lal was trying to create a movie similar to those Ayushmann Khurrana films, which humorously addressed taboo topics. But to my disappointment, Tsunami doesn’t even have the guts to get into that space as well. You might find the random jokes funny, but in the end, only a few of them blend into the narrative, and most of them felt like a forcefully added bit that can give the film the duration of a standard movie.