We have all had it in life: a seemingly random glitch upsetting our entire sense of balance; a minor distraction that we thought was serendipitous yet uncharacteristic; a wearisome thought that gnaws away at our innards discounting all the Zen we have mastered.
Kunchacko Boban-starrer Allu Ramendran, at its heart, is trying to tell us about such little-big things and the havoc they create. More specifically, police driver Ramendran’s life is literally thrown off track as he gets a flat tyre whenever he takes out the jeep. What is initially thought to be a coincidence soon turns out to be a planned attack, with all kinds of ‘Allu’ (nails ingeniously inserted in softer objects and placed on the path of a vehicle) being recovered from the village roads.
Director Bilahari does a good job of introducing the central characters and lining up the apparent suspects in the first half. But beyond that, the film goes haywire as the viewer does not quite know where to concentrate till the interval point.
Kunchacko as the tough cop and Aparna Balamurali as his adamant sister have done their bit, but the duo can hardly hope to plug all the holes in the plot, which is too thin and stretched to its maximum along a running time of two hours and a quarter. The vexation of the lead character, his frustrated attempts at finding the culprit, the futile efforts to gather himself amid the storm – there is only so much scope for translating feelings into visual clues when the backdrop is a laid-back village where even the police are a happy lot with hardly a juicy crime to sink their teeth into.
So, we are given three songs and a football match, among standard doses of jokes and action scenes. The film employs one tested formula after another even as the suspense is revealed and revenge is on.
Jarring note
A couple newly in love shares so much, especially in the age of mobile devices as has been shown by the movie. And that leaves the most jarring note long after the end-credits roll: Why does a girl not even mention to her constantly available boy friend the exasperating ordeal her brother is subjected to? The only obvious answer is, if she does, the credits would have rolled sooner.