Among the post-Mohanlal/Mammootty generation of Malayalam actors, Tovino Thomas stood out. He was brash, passionate, adventurous and not afraid to fall. When Tovino did a workingclass superhero film Minnal Murali, conch shells rang in the stratosphere .
A new talent had arrived! Just a few year later, Tovino has become his own fan. His latest film is a lavish but vacuous costume drama emblazoned in narcissism (Tovino plays three roles), and splattered with selflove , with galloping horses and glistening swords impaling the excursion into the epic zone. Epics, as any filmmaker worth anything would tell you, are not deliberately made.
They just happen. ARM (Ajayante Randam Moshanam) is constructed as a largescale epic. It is like a desert park in a snowscape.
You don’t do that. Having broken the first rudimentary rule of agenda-less high-flying , the self-referential cinema fails to take off on its plastic wings. There are very few honest moments in this lengthy storytelling.
The screenplay (Sujith Nambiar) is purposely puzzling. It gives the audience an abundance of head-scratching opportunities. By the time we gallop to the “GRAND”(in capitals) climax, the storytellers have exhausted every trick in Rajamouli’s Book Of Wannabe Baahubali.
The plot is a mess of aspiring magnificence. The sets are erected in stately splendour and the high-falutin tribalism, so much favoured in South’s cinema after Kantara, assails us from everywhere. Behind all the brocade brouhaha, you.
