‘Dheeran’ movie review: rustic humour works, but film loses its way midway through

Right from the title Dheeran (brave), which defines the protagonist, almost every other character in Devadath Shaji’s debut directorial has a defining trait. From a Hindi-obsessed welder to a local don who is more interested in his perfume business to an illicit liquor brewer who has a penchant for stirring up trouble even in the most peaceful of circumstances, it is a motley crew of oddballs. Eldhose (Rajesh Madhavan), the protagonist, gets that unlikely name which he struggles to live up to from an act of bravery in childhood, that also becomes a moment of tragedy in his life.

Director Devadath Shaji, who wrote the screenplay of Bheeshmaparvam, gives a wrapping of humour to convey all that he wants to. Beneath its surface layer of easy humour, which keeps the film engaging atleast until the halfway point, Dheeran is also about the long-lasting impact of certain events in the lives of people. One particular incident leaves all those who are involved in it deeply scarred, some physical while for some others it is mental. The incident also dictates the whole village’s perception of a particular character.

Part of Dheeran involves a road trip to an interior village in Tamil Nadu, just that the choice of vehicle is an ambulance, the freezer box of which comes in handy for quite a few novel purposes. The strongest phases of the film are set inside the vehicle and in the little village with its host of characters who are adept at poking their noses into the lives of others. These sequences carry the spirit of the many small films of immense rewatch value which used to be made in Malayalam in the late 1980s.

But the non-linear narrative loses its grip when the action shifts to Tamil Nadu, where a character has landed in a soup of his own making. The plot at this point rests on the myriad confusions over a mistaken identity, but the confusions are limited only to the characters in the film. For the audience, there is not much of a surprise in store, which also reduces considerably the overall effect of the film. Towards the end, the plot is ridden with quite a few holes and a lot of convenient occurrences. Even so, the film never strays away from its lighter treatment of almost all the happenings.

The coming together of the 1990s gang of Jagadish, Ashokan, Manoj K. Jayan, Sudheesh and Vineeth was touted as one of the highlights of the film. They live up to the hype to an extent and succeed in carrying the film along with Rajesh Madhavan, Aswathy Manoharan and the rest of the cast.

Dheeran works partly when it banks on rustic humour, but loses its way midway through.