Lucifer - You had me at Ezekiel 25-17

After the weekend orgy of movie reviews and fanboy frenzy, I settled down for a quiet Thursday second show to watch Lucifer. This movie serves the very purpose for which it is made, and how! You don't go to Veega Land for a somber evening of coffee and contemplation. The adrenaline rush of Mohanlal's charisma, Prithviraj's ability to control the audience's attention away from the film's flaws and a balanced script that hides it's sinful length make this movie work like a war horse.

I think its safe to say that Prithviraj has proven his ability to make a good thriller much better than his contemporaries like Joshy, B. Unnikrishnan, Padmakumar and Roshan Andrews. That too on his first attempt. For an industry heavily populated with faux- realism movies, it sure feels good to watch a movie that looks like a movie. Even a comparison within the genre proves Lucifer to be a superior movie to Pulimurugan and Odiyan. Prithviraj has done away with unnecessary fat like gratuitous romance and comic relief, which gives the film a consistent mood and still has used the genre staples like an anti-hero, a pessimistic view of politics and intriguing organized crime. Prithviraj uses these tried and tested old ingredients and yet manages to bring the audience's attention in his control. The audience moves through the movie from one high point to another like a pebble skipping across a lake - never bothering to delve into the depths.

Lucifer is a good example of a "Mohanlal- genre" movie. But what makes it different from the previous iterations is it's balance in the script. It is not a one-man-show like Narasimham (A movie that has aged poorly) where he says all the punch dialogues while everyone else patiently listens till he is ready to start fighting. The high points in the movie are peppered through out the script and are delivered by its ensemble cast. Tovino, Indrajith, Prithviraj, Vivek Oberoi and Manju Warrier influences the audience almost as much as Mohanlal. Instead of relying on a single character, this film successfully leverages its ensemble cast.

Indrajit's interpretation of Govardhan - a twitchy Malayali version of Snowden is quite interesting to watch. It was disappointing that his character was relegated to a device which delivers what the script requires. It would have been a lot more entertaining to have that character developed sufficiently. Vivek Oberoi's portrayal of Bimal Nair is stone-faced and yet adequately menacing to keep up the audience's interest. Manju Warrier's role is relegated to a stereotypical damsel in distress who is waiting for the lead male role to solve everything for her. However, she does justice to whatever few acting moments she is presented with. The presence of an item dance, in spite of all the hoopla about objectification of women in cinema, is very conspicuous.

Despite these flaws, Prithviraj successfully navigates through the script, firing fan-service one after the other at the right time, creating the intended spectacle of a movie. The highest point, for me, was when Mohanlal delivered Samuel L Jackson's Ezekiel 25-7 monologue from Pulp Fiction - two bad-ass actors that I love, joined by an awesome piece of pop-culture cinema. I know this scene would receive mixed responses and would ruffle some feathers among the critics. All I can say is that, at that moment the fanboy took over the student in me. Call it fan-service or guilty pleasure, it just clicked for me at a personal level. Prithviraj draws heavily from other works as well. His homage to Raiders is seen in the climax where there is a scene which resembles Indiana Jones shooting the big bad guy with a scimitar.

In short, Prithviraj has proven himself to be a good John Woo. Whether he can or wants to be a Coppola is yet to be seen.

Rating: Mangalasseri Neelakantan, after six cans of Red Bull and two snorts of cocaine, riding a cyborg Tyrannosaurus Rex to battle.