A still from ‘Vaazha’ 

Five aimless youngsters who bear the load of their parents’ ambition on their frail shoulders! An oft told tale of angst, anger and anguish. But what redeems Vaazha, ’the biopic of a billion boys’, is the humour woven in all the scenes in the first half of the film and the relatability factor in the second half. Smart one-liners — some crude, some crackling — bring on the laughs.  

Ajo Thomas, Vishnu, Moosa, Abdul Kalam and Vivek Anand are five thick friends who can’t seem to crack examinations, and the travails of the backbenchers strike a chord with many viewers. The five buddies come from middle-class families, as the film tracks their lives from pre-school to college and beyond.

But for Moosa, whose father stands by him through thick and thin, the other young men have to deal with parents who have no time to listen to their woes or even let them follow their dreams.

Vaazha means plantain tree in Malayalam; it is also a take on a popular grim adage in Malayalam that says that instead of spending money on a good-for-nothing kid, it would have been better to plant a plantain tree instead!

Film director Vipin Das of Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey and Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil is the writer of the movie, which is directed by Anand Menen who made his debut with Gauthamante Radham.

The Reels-like feel of the film is enhanced by crisp scenes that depict the youngsters’ encounters with unsympathetic, unimaginative teachers in school and college. There is action, fisticuffs and comedy. Somewhere, after the interval, the writer and director suddenly realise that the film — like the protagonists — has been drifting along happily. So, they decide to bring in reality bytes to firm up the story.  

As they plod through engineering college, with seats bought by their parents who dream of the sons achieving their dreams, reality begins to hit them in the form of failed examinations, botched interviews and dead-end flings.

That is when the film shows how parents fail their children by forcing them to follow paths the parents have navigated. How teachers and educators go by examination marks as markers of achievement and have no time to cater to students who might want to chase rainbows of a different kind. Toxic parenting comes under the scanner with age-old practices of abject obedience and gaslighting by nosy relatives being questioned in the movie. A scene in which Ajo’s father (essayed by Azzez Nedumangad) takes on his toxic brothers who gaslight and put down his son, is bound to be a heartwarming moment for youngsters who are forced to exist with such folks.

Even while portraying the hurdles posed by the students’ lack of academic success, writer Vipin does not forget to keep the laughs going. Moreover, even certain poignant scenes in Vaazha do not become cheesy at any point.

What works for this movie most is the relatability factor; director Anand ensures that the film does not become maudlin, although the second half has plenty of scenes where it could have turned into a typical tear-jerker.

Amith Mohan Rajeswari, Siju Sunny, Joemon Jyothir, Anuraj OB and Anu essay the five classmates, and Saafboi appears as the antagonist, the top-scorer and teachers’ pet who ticks all the boxes as an A-lister.

Kottayam Nazeer as Vishnu’s disappointed dad aces his role, and so do Jagadish and Azees. Noby Marcos, appearing as Moosa’s father, keeps its subtle, yet scores as the supportive father. Basil Joseph’s guest appearance adds a zing to the storyline.

Although the women in the film have nothing much to do, Vipin does not make that an excuse for chauvinism or toxic masculinity. Instead, the script underscores how the lack of emotional empathy and maturity make it difficult for them to strike a healthy relationship with women.

The several loopholes in the script are filled by the overall feel-good tone of the movie. The technical team supports the director with apt editing by Kannan Mohan and cinematography by Aravind Puthussery.

Vaazha is a full-on comedy that also asks certain pertinent questions about parenting and education.

Vaazha is currently running in theatres

I’m no stranger to lament when it comes to the disintegration of quality in what passes for movies today, but then along comes a bucket of swill like The Union to remind me things are even worse than I thought. This contrived, pointless, blindingly boring Nutflix vehicle is a pathetic, desperate attempt to keep Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg’s careers alive. Berry’s beauty is pleasant enough for a single-star rating, but the rest arrives six feet under and stays that way.

She plays Roxanne, a sexy spy and two-fisted killer who works for a powerful secret agency called “The Union,” dedicated to saving the free world. (It’s not clear from what.) After a job that goes wrong in Trieste, Italy, resulting in a colossal massacre, The Union decides it needs a new face, plain as pizza dough and unrecognizable to the criminal underworld (translation: i.e., a nobody). Roxanne thinks immediately of her old high school boyfriend Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a construction worker in New Jersey whose banal life of sophistication and adventure extends no further than climbing ladders and hanging out with his brain-dead buddies drinking beer. When she looks him up to renew old memories, he moves in for a clinch, but instead of a kiss, she stabs him in the neck with a hypodermic tranquilizer and he wakes up in London, where the boss of The Union (J.K. Simmons) encourages Roxanne to teach him the power of persuasion any way she can. 

Mike hasn’t seen Roxanne for 25 years, and now she’s recruiting him to risk his life as an innocent, inexperienced and untrained secret 007. The purpose of all this hugga-mugga is neither coherent nor believable, but the lure of being the next James Bond, delivering five million dollars to an army of the world’s most dangerous international thugs while simultaneously falling for a sexy spy with an assault weapon, convinces Mike to join The Union immediately (provided, of course, that he gets back to Jersey in time to be the best man in a pal’s wedding). He’s never been anywhere beyond downtown Hoboken, but before you can say Rambo, he’s dodging bullets, leaping from London rooftops, and driving on the wrong side of the street. The movie doesn’t make one lick of sense, which means it falls perfectly in line with most of the other moronic time-wasters that are polluting the ozone these days.

Roxanne focuses on rigorous physical and psychological training to prepare Mike for his first mission: infiltrating an auction offering stolen intelligence information to the highest bidder for hundreds of millions to retrieve a hard drive containing the names and identities of every spy in the history of Western civilization which, if obtained by the wrong spies, could destroy the free world. In a movie composed of endless predictable cliches, it’s got Iranian terrorists, a motorcycle race through the Italian streets, mediocre explosions and shootouts we’ve seen before in scores of Tom Cruise programmers. The goofball heroics are so second-rate they rob the film of any personality of its own. Hack director Julian Farino lacks the talent and the interest to explain what The Union is all about in terms anyone can understand. The script by joe barton and David Guggenheim never rises above a second-grade level, and there is nothing original or engaging about the film or the shallow performances in it. Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg have zero chemistry, but who can blame them for being so bland in a movie that reads like a manual from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?  

It’s not surprising for an action picture to be this humorless, but how can any film be so noisy, deadly and boring at the same time? The Union is to movies what salami on rye is to four-star gastronomy.

Published 16 August 2024, 20:13 IST