A reputed cast led by the redoubtable Fahadh Faasil, an epic narrative that spans decades, a preference for grittiness over glamour in exam...
A reputed cast led by the redoubtable Fahadh Faasil, an epic narrative that spans decades, a preference for grittiness over glamour in examining the rise of a coastal gangster – Mahesh Narayanan’s Malik is, at the very least, highly ambitious.
The new movie from the Malayalam director of Take Off and C U Soon is very slick, perhaps too much so. Style trumps substance and a cause-and-effect dynamic overtakes psychological shading, leaving us with several beautifully staged and filmed scenes that please the eye but barely touch the soul.
Although Malik has supposedly been inspired by real events in Kerala, the 1970s-style gangster film mostly labours in the shadows of older crime dramas, from The Godfather and Nayakan to Kammattipadam and Vada Chennai.
A few scenes of crosscutting between disparate moments directly pay homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather films, in which a Mafia don brings brutal order to the chaos around him. In other places, Malik follows in the footsteps of recent films that attempt to understand the interplay of politics, urban policy, corruption and selective justice in transforming citizens into criminals.
Faasil’s Sulaiman is out of the book. Pushed into crime by circumstance, the fisherman rises to become a man of the people and the only thing standing between rapacious politicians and projects that will destroy his fishing...
