Take Off - The First Half Syndrome

How often do you ask someone about a movie he saw and he replies, "the first half was kind of boring, but the second half was interesting". This is common for a number of recent movies which actually did well in the box office. The first movie that comes to my mind is Drishyam. Drishyam dragged on through the first half trying to establish the cringe worthy romance between the characters played by Mohanlal and Meena. It did virtually nothing to foreshadow the actual story which the movie is all about. Any significant plot point comes just before the interval. Clearly, the director got the idea for a thriller but didn't know how to make it into a feature length movie. I am not getting in to the fact that the idea was not even original (you will find a number of online discussions about the original story of Drishyam).  Kali is another movie that falls into this category. Sameer Thahir spends the entire first half trying to convince the audience that the protagonist has anger management issues. He gets into the story only in the second half. Its as if you could start watching the movie after the interval and pretty much not miss anything.

I like to call it The First Half Syndrome. This happens when you have an idea worth a short film, or just a poster, or a character around which a story is to be crafted. The film maker tries to bypass this by filling the first half with digestible yet unnecessary story or character developing incidents. Unlike the western film grammar, Indian cinema is not divided into three acts. Indian film makers have to deal with a beast called Interval. Somewhere along the line, a notion that the interval has to occur just after a cliffhanger incident, took root in the film maker's mind. This is fine as long as it is not the first such incident which initiates the audience into the actual story.

Take Off is a pretty intense movie telling the real life story of a bunch of Indian nurses stuck in Iraq during the ISIS rebellion and their later extraction by Indian diplomats. While the movie has some decent performances by Parvathy and Fahd Fazil, it misses some golden opportunities to be a Hollywood level war movie by falling prey to the First Half Syndrome. The first half of the film is spent in developing the back story of the characters and the actual conflict in the story starts seconds before the interval. The movie wastes precious time while the ISIS uprising in Iraq should have been the major plot point at fifteen or twenty minutes into the movie, sending the audience to the edge of the seat. The audience will feel more empathy for the characters if the back stories are developed during the central conflict of the story. This gives more strength and depth to the characters. It was disappointing to see valuable story being confined to the last 45 minutes of the movie.

The movie is definitely worth watching, but it left me with the unsettling feeling that it could have been a lot better. I hate it when an excellent cinematic theme fizzles out due to mediocre scripting.

Rating: That Lays packet filled with 80% air  and 20% chips.