Kaapa movie review: The "trying to be a Mohanlal/Mammootty-type mass superstar" genre returns

Cast: Prithviraj Sukumaran, Asif Ali, Anna Ben, Aparna Balamurali, Nandhu, Jagadish, Dileesh Pothan

Director: Shaji Kailas

Language: Malayalam  

Prithviraj Sukumaran is already a superstar. He has been for a while. Yet Kaapa, like the recent Kaduva, indicates a desire for a different level of mass appeal – the mindless sort, and on a scale that Mohanlal and Mammootty achieved with their most raucous, most markedly men-centric works. Why else would an artiste of this calibre sign up for both Kaduva and Kaapa in the same year, both directed by Shaji Kailas and designed to giantify the hero in formulaic ways that have been done to death by commercial Malayalam cinema in the last three decades?

“Trying to be a Mohanlal/Mammootty-type mass superstar” should be declared a genre. As it happens, Kaapa is not the worst we have seen of it in recent years. It is far from being as grossly violent as the Tovino Thomas starrer Kalki (2019), not as excruciatingly loud as Mikhael (2019) starring Nivin Pauly, nor as terribly scripted as Prithviraj’s own Brother’s Day (2019).

“Not as” is not praise though, it is a measure on a barometer of badness. So to be clear: Kaapa is violent, it is loud and it’s scripting is deficient. Despite its intellectual pretensions, it’s just another clichéd, bloody gangster drama. Women in this crime flick are not as –those two words again – marginalised as they were in Kaduva, but they are not written with depth either.

The title of the film comes from the acronym for the Kerala Anti-Social Activities Prevention Act under which the Kerala Police has created a watch list on which they include a person whose presence there is completely unexpected. This occurrence links a young professional called Anand Anirudhan (Asif Ali) newly arrived in Thiruvananthapuram, and a dreaded local gangster known to everyone as Kotta Madhu (Prithviraj).

Kaapa projects Thiruvananthapuram as a hotbed of underworld activities and gang wars. Anand is protective of his wife Binu Thrivikraman (Anna Ben), a fragile-looking woman who, he informs Madhu, is still recovering from a terrible ordeal. Madhu’s supportive wife Prameela (Aparna Balamurali), on the other hand, appears capable of taking care of herself and her husband. The two families share a horrifying past connection that gives both of them good reason to be suspicious of and antagonistic towards each other.

At heart, Kaapa is about how humans allow themselves to be consumed by unending cycles of violence. When viewed in isolation without the sound and fury packed into the narration style, the plotline actually has elements with potential. As writer G.R. Indugopan and the director colour into that outline though, they smudge it with aspirations to a grandeur they are unable to attain. The dialogues, the hero who refers to himself in third person and the use of slow motion are all geared towards this goal. The script does not have enough substance to support such grandiosity though, as a result of which Kaapa’s ends up being draggy and pretentious.

It is revealed that Madhu is ridden with guilt at the way he once used a person for his own selfish ends, and left that person with a lifetime of trauma. This is meant to establish Madhu as a not-so-evil fellow, yet the script doesn’t give him a justifiable compulsion for having used that person in the first place, leaving his conduct and his regret coming across as inexplicable.

In the opening minutes when Anand tells Binu that the decision regarding whether or not to proceed with her nascent pregnancy is her and hers alone, it might seem as if Kaapa will give at least some of its women characters primacy in the narrative, but that hope gradually fizzles out. Women hover in the background through the film, ultimately serving as twists in the taleyet never fully fleshed or given proper character arcs.

When the background music is not needlessly revved up, Dawn Vincent creates some pretty atmospheric sounds. Too often though, it shoots up in the way music tends to rise in similar mass-targeted, men-dominated commercial Indian films especially those emerging from south India. Add some gratuitous violence to the mix, and the formula is complete.

In Kaapa’s cinematic worldview, it is apparently not sufficient that Madhu speaks of having once impaled a man on a shawarma skewer; we are given a detailed flashback with the camera closing in on a pierced abdomen. Elsewhere a man’s finger is sawed off and in the next shot we are shown that amputated digit being flung into a container of water, sinking slowly for us to see. The issue is not that violence occurs, the issue is the visual treatment of that violence. To be fair, there has been worse. The Jayasurya-starrer Thrissur Pooram (2019), for instance, was abysmal in this regard, but Kaapa does not become good just because others have been more gruesome or more generic.

Even the supposed surprise at the end is not really surprising. This is quite a boring film.

From among this cast, the actor who seems to share Shaji Kailas’ directorial philosophy for Kaapathe most is Prithviraj. The others come off slightly better as a result. Prithviraj’s P.N. Madhukumar a.k.a. Kotta Madhu speaks in a perpetually lowered voice emphasising his natural baritone, as he stretches out each word in a manner implying that Madhu is aware he is in a movie in which he is the central character. The Prithvi who did Koode, AyyappanumKoshiyum and Driving Licence in recent years is so much better than this. He is also so much better than the “mass superstar” space he seems intent on capturing with the likes of Kaduva and Kaapa.

Rating: 1.75 (out of 5 stars) 

Kaapa is in theatres.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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