Minnal Murali Review: Malayalam Superhero Movie Aims For The Sky

Cast: Tovino Thomas, Guru Somasundaram, Baiju, Aju Varghese, Femina George  

Director: Basil Joseph  

Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)   

In a nondescript nook of Kerala, lightning and a twist of fate strike twice and turn two disparate men into forces to reckon with. One of them, the eponymous protagonist (Tovino Thomas), a tailor who believes he deserves a better life, takes the responsibility thrust upon him with the seriousness it deserves.

The other (Guru Somasundaram), a tormented teashop hand who has nothing to lose, decides to go his own way. Both men have a slew of personal battles on their hands and yet stumble upon a larger reason for an epic face-off that goes beyond the ambit of their own lives. That, in a nutshell, is Minnal Murali, a Malayalam superhero movie whose ambitions far outstrip its scope.

Minnal Murali, written by Arun Anirudhan and Justin Mathew, is director Basil Joseph’s third film. It strives very, very hard indeed to acquire an indigenous veneer but fails to shrug off its borrowed trappings and find its own feet – and reason for existence.

It rides on an indigenized, loosely interpreted version of a Batman vs. Joker construct. It lacks a meaningful social and/or cultural context that can hold the fanciful Hollywood-inspired yarn together and make it look at least passably logical in a Malayali milieu.

To be fair, the film, streaming on Netflix, never stops trying and aims for the sky. That gut-it-out spirit is definitely worthy of applause. The film’s technical attributes (barring some of the VFX in the climactic passages) are undeniably solid. Minnal Murali also has parts that manage to stave off the deleterious effects of the sweeping, unoriginal comic-book imagination that propels the endeavour.

The supporting characters – a senior policeman (Baiju) who thinks he owns the town, the hero’s abusive brother-in-law (Aju Varghese), a girl (Femina George) who runs a travel agency that doubles up as a martial arts academy, a woman (Shelly Kishore) who returns to her brother’s home after parting ways with the man she eloped with many eons ago – are accorded considerable footage but they aren’t etched out with sufficient clarity.

Worse, owing to the moral and emotional ambiguity that surrounds the showdown between the hero and the villain – both appear to be driven by similar impulses although their methods diverge sharply in the run-up to an explosive but contrived climax – large segments of the film tumble into a gaping and shallow hole.

The superhero (lungi-clad for the most part) as well as the antagonist (to begin with, as self-effacing as they come) employ indigenous methods to conceal their real identities. A bird-costume straight out of a school play, a gunny bag cover ripped off the face of a scarecrow, towels and other pieces of cloth come in handy as the two men venture forth in anonymity to demonstrate their superhuman physical and mental powers.

These eventually give way to a derivative superhero suit that the tailor-protagonist presumably stitches for himself to announce the advent of a crusader who means business and is in the mood to launch an action movie franchise.

For Minnal Murali to yield a steady stream of sequels, the titular character would not only need to soar much higher than he does here but he would also have to look for a stronger, less whiny foe. The man Minnal Murali takes on never stops playing the victim card: his rage stems from the fact that he is denied his dignity.

Minnal Murali uses heartbreaks, misfortunes and infernos to drive the plot. The hero is a drifter jilted by his college flame who heeds her policeman-brother’s advice and decides to dump him; the latter is a tormented outcast.

The film opens with a bang and a blaze that claim a few lives and leaves a young boy severely wounded. The film harks back to this incident in the build-up to the finale. Several more fires and explosions occur through the 159-minute film. But the real turning points of Minnal Murali are the two lightning strikes.

As things pan out, the two men have scores to settle not just with each other but with the world around them. It has women who do not have the courage to stand up to their male siblings. One of them (Sneha Babu) is petrified of her stern brother, who has no qualms about abusing the power that his uniform grants him. The other warms up to the feelers of her silent lover sends out but cannot gather the courage to assert herself.

Minnal Murali is about weak (or misguided) men who need strokes of luck to shed their timidity and a bunch of meek women robbed of their right to decide their own fate. Taking a leaf out of the Marvel and DC Comics playbook, Minnal Murali tracks how an ordinary man dreaming of escape from the drudgery of an uneventful life transforms into a saviour of a small town under siege.

The makers would have done infinitely better had they devised a fresher and more rooted approach to narrating the story of a crime-buster endowed with exceptional powers. Jaison/Minnal Murali is played with a blend of flair and restraint by Tovino Thomas but the tale does not exactly kick up a storm.

The film is more a billowy account of the birth of a superhero than a saga of an earth-shattering battle between good and evil. It takes Jaison quite a while and a lot of egging-on from a nephew to figure out the exact nature of the special powers that he possesses and what use he could put them to.

The setting is about the only aspect of Minnal Murali that sets it apart from the American superhero movies that it unabashedly apes. In a crucial scene, the hero’s nephew explains to him that Spider-Man acquired his powers because a spider bit him. But the boy is unable to tell him how and why Bruce Wayne became Batman. He was probably hit with a cricket bat, he says airily.

That is how Minnal Murali saunters along, embracing an all-too-literal manner and abandoning a sense of irony as it seeks to convince us that a Batman-like superhero is par for the course in Kerala. Are we writing off the film? Not at all. If nothing else, Minnal Murali aims high enough not to fall with a thud when its wings lose strength. It manages to stay afloat even when it dips precariously low.