Abhi Review

There are (or rather, ought to be) some criteria for dubbing a movie and releasing it in a region that shares little in common with the original. Either the film should have been a hit because of its universal appeal, or the theme itself would have been universal, or, purely commercially, the revenue generated by the film running in any theater in any region should be greater than or equal to the dubbing cost. This Malayalam-dubbed movie seems to have followed the third criterion only.

So here you have a star who is an icon in Malayalam cinema (and whose ever-rising popularity can be matched only by his ever-increasing paunch), a theme that is as old as the icon himself (and believe us, he is pretty old!), and more effort, time and money spent on blowing up a car and on an action scene in a forest instead of on the editing and screenplay. And what results is a potboiler that carries itself on the frail shoulders of the ageing star and nothing else. To top it all, that star is a nobody here.

Abhi's theme is terrorism, or rather anti-terrorism. Lucifer Munna (Arun Pandyan), a bloke with a funny accent, wants to blow up the whole of Kerala - oops, Andhra Pradesh, just because he insists that he is a terrorist. And we have the cop in the anti-terrorism bureau, Ganga Prasad (Mohan Lal), who thwarts every plan of his. Munna, in order to close this issue once and for all, decides to capture the cop's issue, his only son Abhi (hence the name of the movie) so that the cop would help him out of this muck in return for his child's safety.

So some action sequences, some senti by wife Shobhana and some inane songs later, and not strictly in that order, the movie comes to an end with the predictably predictable ending, a moral that terrorism is bad. We did not know that.

My only message would be to that a genius of an actor called Mohan Lal. You are one of the finest actors of Indian cinema. Your roles in films like 'Vanaprastham' have given the art of acting a new dimension. But films such as this will just send messages of the wrong nature - that you think that anything with you in it will be accepted by your frenzied fans. It may be, but true lovers of cinema would be grossly disappointed with an icon relegating himself to bathos just because of something as ephemeral as popularity.