BOTTOM LINE
Visually Stunning, Not Timeless

CENSOR
U/ 1hr 58m

What Is the Film About?

Mufasa: The Lion King traces the origin story of two lions, Mufasa and Taka (who later becomes Scar), focusing on their childhood and the events that led to their eventual rivalry. Mufasa is an orphaned cub, befriended by Taka, a young lion prince, near a waterbody. Over time, as Mufasa’s true origins are revealed, it affects his friendship with a resentful Taka.

Performances

It’s absolutely delightful that a leading star like Mahesh Babu chose to dub for Mufasa. He complements the character with his trademark wit and dialogue delivery, excelling both at humour and intense situations. Satyadev, as the voice artiste for Taka, is equally impressive and gets adequate scope to showcase his vocal modulation as per the transformation of the character. 

The artistes who truly bring the roof down with their delightful comic timing are the legendary duo Brahmanandam and Ali as Pumbaa and Timon. Their improvisation, while staying within the boundaries of their scenes, is impeccable and yet again reiterates the value they could bring to a film, even if it’s through their voices. Ayyappa P Sharma brings a new dimension to villainy as Kiros.

Analysis

It’s interesting how franchises are ruling the roost in world cinema – helping studios ensure a minimum guarantee sum at the box office in unpredictable times through glitzy technological upgrades. One also can’t deny the prospect that franchise-driven cinema limits the avenues to tell newer stories. Is there a middle ground though, where the producers and film connoisseurs are equally satisfied?

The iconic ‘The Lion King’ got a new lease of life with its 2019 reboot, which may have lacked the soul of the original but was successful in capturing the imagination of a new generation of filmgoers. The idea for a spinoff in this universe is by all means redundant and exploitative, though you give it a chance because of Mufasa – and the desire to know him beyond the obvious. 

Mufasa: The Lion King transports you back to Mufasa’s childhood, where he’s separated from his parents during a flood and eventually bumps into a young lion Taka. Much to the disappointment of Obasi (Taka’s father), Taka and an orphaned Mufasa are raised by Eshe (Taka’s mother). While Mufasa wins over their family, his rise eventually threatens his friendship with Taka. 

The film is constantly on the move, taking the viewers through many critical junctures in Mufasa and Taka’s journey towards Milele, how they forge an unlikely friendship with a lioness Sarabi, a hornbill Zazu and a mandrill Rafiki. The visual world-building is meticulous and jaw-dropping, alternating from a musical to an action-adventure, integrating drama with humour.

The heart of the tale lies in Mufasa’s childhood portions, which simply sweep you off your feet. From exploring Mufasa’s vulnerabilities as a child to his playful friendship with Taka and the action sequences that establish his leadership skills- you truly get a sense of his genius and instincts in crises. However, the film takes a turn for the worse as the stakes are raised.

The subplot portraying the supposed animosity between the white lion Kiros and Obasi is hurried and doesn’t grow on the viewer. The screenwriting choices are particularly absurd – in how Taka is reduced to a staple antagonist (due to Mufasa and Sarabi’s growing affinity). It’s baffling why a film that tries so hard to create a visual extravaganza fails to liberate the plot from its obvious problems.

As films chase photorealistic remakes of iconic films with posterity and attempt to give them a believable visual exterior, they sacrifice the idea of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (while chasing something realistic). If The Lion King aims to be more relevant with times, writers must relook at the franchise’s storytelling tropes, altering gender equations and reanalysing animal behaviour. 

Mufasa: The Lion King has the story of an Indian potboiler that takes its audiences for granted. Many a time, you end up feeling if the creators simply replaced humans with animals in a typically massy story. How else can you explain the adopted son-true son conflict, betrayal between friends and a love triangle among lions? This spinoff has the scale but is devoid of magic and soul. 

Music and Other Departments?

If there’s anything that keeps the film together in its direst situations, it is Nicholas Britell’s emphatic music score and the terrific imagery – constructed photo-realistically using CGI, under the expertise of James Laxton. However, the same can’t be said about the ‘musical’ aspects of the film. 

Neither are the songs catchy nor do they add much value to the proceedings. The Telugu dialogues for the film are inconsistent at best, the slangs keep changing conveniently and the wordage is hardly appealing to its target audience. 

Highlights?

Dubbing of Mahesh Babu, Satyadev, Ali and Brahmanandam

The visual imagery and music score

The first hour focusing on Mufasa’s younger years

Drawbacks?

Too many illogical, cinematic liberties

The humanistic behaviour of lions 

Musical portions

Did I Enjoy It?

Yes, in parts

Will You Recommend It?

Yes, if you’re a hard core fan of The Lion King universe

Mufasa: The Lion King Movie Review by M9

Rumors of the death of the biopic have been greatly exaggerated.

The rumors go something like this: Twenty years ago, director James Mangold made Walk the Line about the life and times of Johnny Cash, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. It was a critical and box office hit—Witherspoon even won the Best Actress Oscar. The movie was as traditional as it gets, starting with Johnny’s abusive childhood on a farm, and going on to depict his musical ambitions, his chaotic love life, his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and his career setbacks and triumphs.

Indeed, the film was so by-the-numbers, it prompted a parody, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which was both an uncanny simulacrum and a brutal takedown. There’s nothing like a good parody to make you realize how cliched a particular genre really is and once Walk Hard lifted the curtain its tropes, it seemed that the traditional biopic was doomed.

Not so fast! Biopics have merely evolved: Recent ones have largely eschewed the Wikipedia-style retelling of a biography, instead homing in on a particularly illuminating period of the subject’s life. I think that’s a good development, as it forces the filmmaker to reflect on what they think is important about the subject and why this pivotal time frame matters.

It’s fair to say that A Complete Unknown, Mangold’s new biopic of Bob Dylan, exists in a post Walk Hard world. We don’t have hazy flashbacks to Dylan’s childhood in Minnesota; there’s no framing device of present day Dylan, old and craggy, reflecting on his life. Instead, the film focuses on the period when young Bobby Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with a guitar and a dream. It ends shortly after the infamous Newport Folk Festival where Dylan scandalized the assembled crowd and organizers by “going electric.” (Damn, America was cute back then.)

That said, there is nothing experimental or avant-garde in the storytelling here. It’s straightforward. Its pleasures come from seeing Timothée Chalamet channel Dylan, from its brilliant supporting cast (particularly Edward Norton as Pete Seeger—more on him in a bit), and from its painstaking recreation of the 1960s folk scene.

Let’s start with Chalamet, because that’s who you’re here to read about. Famously, he does all of his own singing and guitar/harmonica playing in the film—and most of the takes are live, because he wanted to capture Dylan’s rough and raw performance style. Only Dylan can really do justice to Dylan, but Chalamet comes close and his instinct to perform live was spot-on. He nails Dylan’s nasal, mumbly voice and he has his confident magnetism on stage as well as his hooded, cautious presence off of it. (Dylan is the rare celebrity who says he hates fame—and we believe him.) Chalamet seems every inch the brooding, tortured, formidable young talent. And the concert scenes rip.

Young Dylan gravitated to the folk scene, because he was a natural born singer-songwriter and because he idolized Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). But in many ways, he wasn’t a natural fit. He simply wasn’t earnest enough—everything he did was suffused with irony. And he believed that for something to be beautiful, it also had to be a little bit ugly. He derides his musical—and sometimes romantic—partner Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) for having a voice that’s “too pretty.” “Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist’s office,” he sneers. Baez correctly calls him an asshole.

The foil to Dylan was Pete Seeger (Edward Norton)—as earnest and irony-free as they come. Pete meets Dylan when the young musician shows up unexpectedly at Woody Guthrie’s hospital room. (This, like many scenes in the film is an amalgamation of actual events.) Guthrie, already deep in the throes of Huntington’s disease, can barely communicate, but he bangs his nightstand with appreciation as Dylan belts out the homage tune, “Song to Woody.” Seeger, too, recognizes that Dylan is a special talent and takes him home to crash at his house for a while.

Seeger is shown as having a wonderful life. His wife is a devoted partner, both personally and professionally. His children are adorable and loving. His home exudes an easy, familial warmth. But he is not the brilliant artist Dylan is. What’s more, he truly believes in the special power of folk music—a simple song, simply told, often with a humanitarian message. Dylan doesn’t outwardly scorn Seeger—he appreciates his talent. But he sees him as a bit of a relic and he finds the music corny. And Norton plays Seeger as sweet and sincere, humbled by Dylan’s talent and a little wounded by his artistic rejection. It’s a heartbreaking performance.

The film also focuses on Dylan’s love life. There are two central women in his life—Baez and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a beautiful peace activist who brought a measure of comfort and stability to Dylan’s life, but didn’t get much in return.

It’s funny that this is one of the few films Chalamet has done where he’s a true romantic lead—Call Me By Your Name was a love story, but he was the one doing most of the pining (and he was a literal cannibal in Bones and All so does that really count?). Here, he is the object of desire—withholding, mysterious, creative, and a bit of a dick. Who among us has not fallen for that guy? (Even with the help of a slight prosthetic nose, Chalamet is more handsome than Dylan ever was. But honestly, it was Dylan’s brilliance and elusiveness that made him so alluring. And Chalamet captures those qualities well.)

Mangold is a an exceptionally competent director. You can sit back and know you’re in the hands of a true pro. But he does have a hard time avoiding cliché or facile mash-ups. The Civil Rights movement is merely a tiny backdrop to the film, although Mangold makes it very clear that Black artists approved of the young troubadour. (At least twice he has an established Black blues artist—Odetta, in the wings of the Newport Folk Festival, and the made-up bluesman Jesse Moffett, on the set of Pete Seeger’s public access television show, Rainbow Quest—nod approvingly as Dylan sings.) This strikes me as self-serving, a shorthand for really delving into Dylan’s relationship to Black music and the civil rights movement. And Mangold uses Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), clearly one of his heroes, as an avatar for artistic rebellion and integrity. (“Track some mud on the carpet,” he advises young Bob.) The pep talks he gives Dylan were likely fabricated.

The heart and soul of the film, though, is that relationship between Dylan and Seeger. And here’s where giving a film focus really does help. Because Norton’s open, searching face will break you. But it also reflects a larger cultural shift, away from a more decorous kind of counterculture, to one that was loud and rebellious and angry.

Do we understand Dylan better after watching A Complete Unknown? A bit. He’s a famously elusive figure (which Todd Hayne’s cleverly tackled in his experimental Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, by giving Dylan several different personas played by different actors). But the film’s biggest thrill is watching the formation of an uncompromising artist and getting a little taste of what it must’ve been like to wander into Gerde’s Folk City on a random night and see a young man in a snap cap who was about to change the world.

In the final moments of the movie Rifle Club, there are references to the Wild Wild West films that have Mexican stand-offs and stuff. The intention of Aashiq Abu and his writers is to create something of that texture against the backdrop of the hill stations of Kerala, where placing a similar wildness and lawlessness is very convincing. With a runtime of around 114 minutes, the movie is very much focused on what it wants to say, and a larger chunk of the screenplay is invested in building the club and its characters. While the pre-climax face-off between the two gangs is pretty slick and engaging, somewhere, I felt the finale needed a bit more refinement to have that wow factor.

As you can guess from the title, the film is about a rifle club in Wayanad. The story is set in 1991, and a Malayalam superstar named Shajahan, who predominantly works in romantic films, has come to the club in order to get some training in hunting. He has plans to do a hunting movie similar to Mrugaya. But the night he chose to spend there wasn’t really the best day as the club had uninvited visitors. Who are these visitors, and what they really want is what we see in Rifle Club.

The structuring of Rifle Club, to an extent even the location, has a similarity to Varathan on a script level. A major part of the movie is getting invested in showing us who these characters are, how they are to each other, and to what extent they can go. In the middle portions of the movie, you can see the script trying to draw parallels between the events happening in the Rifle Club and the actual hunting. The script neatly foreshadows many things that really elevate some portions of the final act of the movie. Just like Varathan, it is the counterattack that really sets the ball rolling. And the banter that happens between Dayanand and Avaran is hilarious, and in those patches, you get to see the Aashiq Abu we sort of missed post-COVID.

Dileesh Pothan, as Avaran, is pretty agile and confident. The body language and the dialogue delivery are on point, and you can sense the experience of that character in the way he has performed. Anurag Kashyap, as the antagonist, gets to be this crazy dad character. In most of his acting gigs, we have seen him do similar stuff, and this time, it was in better clothes. Vijayaraghavan, as the veteran of the club, was pretty good. Vishnu Agasthya plays a fairly extensive character in the movie, and he performed his part with ease. Sooraj, aka Hanumankind, as Bheera was fine in that eccentric character and it was actually a good casting choice. Vineeth Kumar plays the part of the film star, who transforms over the course of the incident. The rest of the cast has some big names like Suresh Krishna, Vani Vishwanath, Surabhi Lakshmi, Unnimaya Prasad, Darshana Rajendran, etc. Their screen times are relatively less, but they are all pretty memorable because of the character quirks.

Aashiq Abu, who has also done cinematography for this film, knows that surprise isn’t really the element that can make this movie work. World-building is really necessary for the final act to work, and for that, writers Syam Pushkaran, Dileesh Karunakaran, and Suhas use the first half. You get to see the rough dynamic between the members of the club. The things that Avaran tells Shajahan while he aims, which also come in the form of lyrics, are basically a description of the attitude of the club members. The cinematography opts for monochromatic sharp lights for a lot of sequences, which sort of sets a genre movie ambiance. Rex Vijayan’s tracks and background score really pump up some of the setpieces.

As I already said, Rifle Club is under two hours long, and it is not beating around the bush to get to the main deal. That aspect of the movie, along with a banter-filled set piece in the final act, really elevates the film. But in totality, I felt the ending should have been a better extension of the kind of action we saw till that point. On the bright side, for people who used to love Aashiq Abu films, this one gives reassurance that he still has it in him.