On retrospect, there is hardly anything redeeming in Siddique’s ‘Big Brother’ that would leave you exhilarated or even mildly energised. All this film does manage to do is bring back fond reminiscences of those wonderful films that the film maker had once gifted us with, and dwell on how remote and futile his recent cinematic endeavours had emerged to be.
It’s appalling to watch a film maker as Siddique, falling back on thriller clichés that one wouldn’t dare to touch with a barge pole these days, and come up with ‘Big Brother’ in the opening month of 2020. Goes without saying that this film squanders the efforts of some very talented actors and ends up as a listless work that falls flat way too easily.
Sachidanandan (Mohanlal) has spent the better part of his life in jail, following two murders that he had committed while in his teens. His youngest brother Manu (Sarjano Khalid) does finally manage to get him out of prison, but the world that awaits Sachi outside is one that he cannot easily adapt to. When his younger brother Vishnu (Anoop Menon) gets married to Vandana (Honey Rose), who recalls having met Sachi at a vantage point in her life,it seems that Sachidanandan might have quite a long story to tell.
It’s disheartening to see an actor as Mohanlal move about in a film that steadily sinks down into oblivion, in sequences that make you squirm around on your seats in impatience. The marriage scene is one such instance, where Sachi keeps asking for excuses to keep himself away from the crowd, and we feebly end up wondering how long this would go on, until the point has been finally made.
Stuffed with such inconsequential scenes, ‘Big Brother’ runs for an unbelievably long two hours and forty five minutes, but isn’t smart enough to keep its viewers hooked. How does one keep one’s brains intact when one gets to watch four men kidnap a young girl, and pretend to go on a fun trip with her so that she isn’t distressed? Needless to say, she soon grabs a guitar and breaks into a song, with the rest of them romping around clueless as to what had hit all of them in the heads.
The action sequences are nothing short of disastrous as well, with concrete slabs and all being thrown around like they were chocolate wafers. This is in many ways a retrograde actioner in that everything about it appears staged, and the sorry attempts at story telling goes progressively awry until it has all clogged up beyond any possibilities of cleansing.
Vedantham IPS (Arbaaz Khan) and his efforts to pin down the drug mafia, Shetty (Siddique) the shady underworld kingpin and the trio of goons who would hand over their hearts on a platter to Sachi – Pareekar (Irshad), Khan (Tini Tom) and Khani (Vishnu Unnikrishnan) pretty much render the picture complete. Add to it Arya Shetty (Mirnaa Menon) who goes dreamy eyed every time Sachi passes by, and you have it all.
There is talk of the undisclosed deals that go on in prisons, there is talk of terrorist attacks, there is talk of the big, bad underbelly of every city that reeks of drugs, there is talk of revenge and redemption and there is talk of unconditional sibling love – all in a film that strives real hard to hold its bits together from falling apart, but to no avail.
On retrospect, there is hardly anything redeeming in Siddique’s ‘Big Brother’ that would leave you exhilarated or even mildly energised. All this film does manage to do is bring back fond reminiscences of those wonderful films that the film maker had once gifted us with, and dwell on how remote and futile his recent cinematic endeavours had emerged to be.
Verdict: Disappointing