Vimaanam - You dun goofed.

Vimaanam catches you off guard by starting off as a generic and over-the-counter romance and soon turning into a ridiculous bat-shit crazy story. The movie slowly progresses through utterly forgettable song sequences and exposition that makes you  bored enough to check your whatsapp messages, and before you know it, you are gripping the armrests of your chair trying to deal with the jaw dropping levels of idiocy. After this roller coaster ride, the audience comes out of the theater with only one question in mind - WTF just happened??

When I first saw the trailer, I was expecting a Malayalam version of October Sky. The story of a young man trying to make a home-made plane/rocket, with a dash of romance and melodrama, and his eventual success in spite of all the odds. There is nothing wrong with a healthy dose of melodrama, in fact it would have been a welcome change from the current fixation on "realism". But Vimaanam takes it to unbelievable extends and shifts the whole focus from the central theme. For a movie that is supposed to be celebrating the achievements of a real-life person with disabilities, Vimaanam is simply looking for an excuse to tell a rinsed and repeated love story.

The film is cluttered with pointless elements like - an inexplicably unnecessary role by Major Ravi, a blind girl played by Lena (why did she have to be blind??), forgettable songs that only prolong your agony and the hero's disability which you remember only when you see his hearing aid set. The cherry on the cake was when the hero breaks out of a cell, takes his plane and flies it to the airport to meet his girlfriend, making this film a 145 minute long Harlem Shake video.

There isn't much to write about Vimaanam. It is not a crime to make a bad movie. It happens. You own it, learn from it and move on. I'm just baffled by Prithviraj droning on in interviews about how particular he is about selecting projects and how much thought has gone into this film. This is just a campus film with a huge budget.

Rating: Exactly the kind of movie you would watch if the tickets are free.