At the end of the film United Kingdom of Kerala, the director Arun Vaiga is literally telling the audience why he decided to make this movie, and while he is saying that, a lot of stats are being shown on screen about how many students are leaving Kerala every year to have a better life abroad. The fact that the director had to say what prompted him to make the film at the end despite having more than two hours is proof of the fact that the film has failed its mission. I am pretty sure the main keyword of the marketing of this movie would be relevance because the quality of the film won’t give them the confidence to use excellence.
Tony is the son of Roychan. Roychan’s wife Mary left him and Tony at a very early stage to have a good life in the UK. Ever since that, sending Tony to the UK so that he can have a safe life over there has been Roychan’s dream. He has been finding money from all sources to fund Tony’s IELTS coaching. But Tony, on the other hand, is someone who wants to live his life in Kerala, and he never aspired to live in the UK. The evolution of this conflict between the father and son and how all this changes Tony’s life dramatically is what we see in the film United Kingdom of Kerala aka UKOK.
The topic of many youngsters moving to the UK and several other countries for higher education and jobs is indeed something we all have been hearing, and there has been a boom in the overseas education consultancy business. The movie UKOK, by the way, is only brushing upon this topic almost as an excuse to show all the other inconsequential things like the song and dance. The lazy first half of the movie shows us a flashback story followed by multiple sequences that have no major relevance other than the hero showing off his dancing and fighting skills. The interval block of the movie was actually kind of good, and I thought now we have a solid conflict, and the movie will at least focus on something. But to my disappointment, Arun Vaiga decides to skip that conflict, and the film becomes this modern-day version of Varavelpu directed by Shankar, but in the laziest manner.
When you write a script, you build something around your core concept, layer it, and develop a solid foundation. In the case of United Kingdom of Kerala, there is no effort to make us feel the agitation and frustration of the main character. And the main reason for that is the uninventive writing. Arun Vaiga is going after the most generic reasons possible. One can argue that reality may well look like a cliche. But good filmmaking will not make the audience say, “Here we go again.” The utopian dreams of this movie and the ambitious solutions it wants to provide would have looked cinematically interesting if there had been an effort to reach them from the beginning of the film. In the case of the film United Kingdom of Kerala, the Indian 2 kind of flower revolution we see on screen is so bad that they had to use Rajesh Murugesan’s background score excessively, almost like how Jayaram used Talcum powder to cover up his mistakes in Mazhavil Kavadi.
Ranjith Sajeev, in his fourth outing, is still struggling to get into the skin of the character. It is almost like his inability to be a believable middle-class guy who loves his home turf is making the movie depend on dance numbers and fight sequences to project him as this hero material. Ranjith, whose Malayalam diction is not that great, is playing someone who is supposed to be fluent in Malayalam and gets impressed if someone speaks in English. Well, that make-belief was not working at all. Johnny Antony is playing the father role in his usual hesitating style. Even though he is getting to play some emotional scenes, unlike his other dad roles, the writing was not helping him to make the character believable. Sarangi Shyam was introduced to us as the leading lady, and frankly, she felt more like a supporting actor in the backdrop. Many prominent names like Indrans, Manju Pilla, Rony David Raj, Sangitha, Manoj K Jayan, Alphonse Puthran, etc., are part of the cast in roles with minimal screen time. There was a scene featuring a girl who went through a lot of troubles because of her decision to study abroad and the performance of Meenakshi Jayan in that scene was probably the best in the whole film.
The final quarter of the movie has a sudden tone shift, and our hero is on a mission to bring revolution to Kerala and stop young people from going abroad. We have scenes like him educating the CM of the state about the situation, and the CM even sits and listens to it as fresh news. The movie is actually like those mediocre government ads that ask people to don’t smoke, drink, or litter. But there are times they are so bad that you would feel like doing all those don’ts. The lack of creativity in UKOK is so evident that I won’t be amused if somebody applies for a Visa after watching this movie.
