A few late flourishes can sometimes redeem a film even though it might be hurtling downhill till that point. But, in Deeno Dennis’s directorial debut Bazooka, that supposed redemption arc comes way beyond a point where most of us would have stopped caring for the characters or the plot. It comes almost like a dessert that arrives after a tasteless main course that made your stomach feel queasy. As for the dessert, beyond the dressing on top, it turns out to be the same old under it.
In Bazooka, hardly a moment passes without a background score. In a film tailor-made for the superstar’s fans, a good part of this score is dedicated to accentuating his every random movement. It begins right from the moment we see John Caesar (Mammootty) at a bus stop, reading a self-help book and waiting for a bus — inside which a good part of the film takes place. But then, ACP Benjamin Joshua (Gautham Vasudev Menon) also gets the same treatment when we first see him getting out of his car to carry out a routine vehicle check. This is not surprising in a film which survives mostly on its cosmetics.
Bazooka (Malayalam)
Director: Deeno Dennis
Runtime: 154 minutes
Cast: Mammootty, Gautham Menon, Siddharth Bharathan, Bhama Arun, Hakkim Shah, Divya Pillai
Plot: A forensic expert attempts to aid the police force in tracking down a criminal mastermind who leaves them puzzled with a series of clues
It comes dressed up as a gaming thriller, for the simple reason that characters play games, including a person who plays it loudly inside a bus, much to the discomfort of the others. Caesar, a forensic expert travelling in the bus, is trying to help the police track down a criminal mastermind who leaves them clues before every heist. Much of this story is told through his never-ending, patchily-written conversations with his nosy neighbour (Hakkim Shah), also the noisy gamer.
Interspersed with this are a few action sequences with a biker gang that does not have anything to do with the narrative other than make a show of the star’s action prowess. The things that some writers and filmmakers resort to in the name of “fan service” turn out to be a kind of disservice to the actor as well as his fans.
The police investigation is another joke altogether, especially the decoding of some of the clues. Some lines that appear to have been written just as fillers for the visuals turn out to be unintentionally comic. When a police officer says that the mastermind could be a psychopath, the ACP retorts, “Let’s not glorify him”. One wonders in which parallel world is psychopath a term used for glorification. The screenplay, for the most part, is an aimless mishmash of events, failing to excite us, despite the cues through the background scores signalling us to get excited.
For a film branded as a “gaming thriller”, Bazooka ends up as a dull film with barely an exciting passage of play that is worthy of the star it is supposedly celebrating.
Bazooka is currently running in theatres
Published – April 10, 2025 05:52 pm IST
