Family feuds, political debauchery, entrepreneurs, gangsters, heavy duty vehicles, SUVs and epic family dramas make a good Joshy film. He makes ‘big movies’ and every single entity in his movies justify the grandness of the theme. Even though he made some small budget movies they all had at least one super star playing the lead. With Sevenes, he breaks this stint and experiments with newcomers. We wish he didn’t.
Sevenes is a disaster, for the director as well as the moviegoers, even though television channels have a different opinion. It is the only major film which was released this Onam. So it is no wonder that channels are going head over heels about the film’s casting and music. It is an authentic flop from beginning till end. Partly because it converts a well-intentioned story into a melodramatic, sentimental, over the top script (common in Malayalam cinema). Writer Iqbal Kuttippuram forgot to add real dialogues or real action in his script.
The film is about seven ordinary youngsters, who accidentally fall into the hands of Quotation groups. What is wrong here is that none of the seven guys look ordinary. They don’t act or talk like ordinary people. On the other hand they are more like the urban middle class youngsters whom we saw in Traffic, Salt n’ pepper or Cappa Kurishu.
Except for the fact that all seven belong to a regional Sevens football team in Kozhikode, there is nothing tangible that connects them or the film to the game itself, which is a hysteria in northern Kerala. Instead the film shows a fabricated Sevens match in the beginning and tries to hang on to the seven central characters till the end in a desperate attempt to substantiate the title.
The concept of seven characters is also a flawed one. The story is not distributed equally among the seven. Instead it concentrates more on the parts played by Kunchako Boban and Asif Ali. Some of them don’t even have any real dialogues which make us wonder why they are in the film. Midway through the film Nadia Moithu makes her presence felt. However, she turns out to be as over exaggerated and as dramatic like the ‘sevens’, thus becoming tedious and repetitive. The seven youngsters in the film act dumb and they jump from one mistake to another without any thinking. There is a villain in the movie, but somewhere through the second half he is lost and is not mentioned at all, until he makes his appearance towards the end.
Music by Bijibal can be ignored which annoys the audience with its odd mix of spooky and irritating notes. Cinematography by Ajayan Vincent does capture the pace of the Sevens match, but such technicalities is lost in the wilderness, once the film abandons even the basic notions of storytelling. Sevenes belongs to that category of films which people would like to forget as a bad dream. Director Joshy tried to follow his counterpart Sibi Malayil by casting fresh blood, but miserably failed due to bad execution of the story. Hope he would do a better job in his yet to be made Valayar Paramashivam starring Dileep (2nd part to Runway) or in his upcoming movie with Mohanlal.
rahul