Turbo Movie Review: Even Mammootty can't save this colossal mess

It's a very challenging task to discuss a film like Turbo without coming across as insulting. Admittedly, one might want to appreciate the movie for Mammootty's sake, considering his reinvention as an actor at a stage when most in his profession contemplate retirement. However, the film's shallowness makes genuine praise difficult.

Mammootty's Turbo Jose is a village toughie, notorious for wreaking havoc during the celebrations of the Perunnal festival or Feast days in his village. Consequently, a man requests Jose's mother Rosakutty, played by Bindu Panicker, to send him away for a few days to prevent him from ruining his festival business at the carnival. In view of the greater good, Rosakutty commands Jose to take a trip to Kodaikanal (influence of Manjummel Boys?) and come back after a few days. Jose doesn't like it, but he never disobeys his mother. Yet, he defies his mother's commands and returns to the carnival just in time to save Jerry (Shabareesh Varma) when he learns about his rival gang's plan to attack his friends. Jose makes a grand entry in his jeep, accompanied by a deafening background score. Once he steps out, he looks at a little girl who is visibly blown away by his entry and stunt. The girl gives a big thumbs up, providing Jose with much-needed validation before he begins a full-blown retaliation against his rivals.

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Director Vysakh and screenwriter Midhun Manuel Thomas may have had an easy job if the audiences were made up only of 6-year-olds like that girl. But, for grown-ups, the narrative needed to be a little more complex, or the writing must have been outlandishly entertaining to make the movie even slightly appealing.

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The screenplay has been crudely contrived to pit Jose against Vetrivel Shanmugha Sundaram, played by Raj B. Shetty, the antagonist. Raj more than once proclaims, "That's so cliche." It doesn't have the ironic effect Midhun intended when he wrote that line in the script. Instead, it feels like a confession of the filmmakers' lack of imagination in creating a movie that respects the audience's time and intelligence.

The main plot, allegedly, is Vetrivel's covert operation to dislodge the democratically elected government of Tamil Nadu via horse-trading. Vetrivel is engaged in a large-scale bank scam to gather hundreds of crores to pay the elected legislators to turn against their own party. Jerry and Indhulekha (Anjana Jayaprakash), close friends of Jose, work in the banks that are at the heart of Vetrivel's scheme. As you can expect, when Jerry and Indhulekha pose a threat to Vetrivel's master plan, he decides to get rid of them, inevitably causing Jose to get involved in the plot. However, this storyline has not been effectively adapted into the screenplay.

The narrative unnecessarily wastes too much time unnecessarily building up Jose as a franchisable character. The jokes are not funny enough, the fight sequences lack oomph, and the whole narrative feels stale. You know a movie is a dud when its screenplay fails to utilize the talents of some of the country's best actors.

Just like the hero in Turbo, Mammootty can't always save his loved ones (read the director and writer) from a mess.

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