Aadhi review: not for story value, but only for parkour

Intelligence in scripting was something that was a part of Jeethu Joseph movies. His mega project Aadhi which launched star kid Pranav Mohanlal is a film that severely lacks this intelligence aspect of it. A story that is very thin in terms of plot gets pampered by the Jeethu Joseph components. The hurried conceiving of this idea makes the overall experience a dull one.

An aspiring young musician named Adithya Mohan is our main protagonist. He is looking for a break and one of his friends tells him that there is a place in Bangalore where prominent film people will come to see live performances. So Aadhi decides to go there and the movie talks about what happens in that journey and how he manages to survive from it.

The film has a gracious cameo and scenes that are blatantly endorsing the off screen persona of the new actor. All these things really mess up this movie that needed a much calmer and real treatment. Family drama and suspense thriller are the genres Jeethu Joseph has tried in most of his films and here also the formula is pretty much the same. The sudden and unreal phase change of Aadhi is quite unconvincing. It will remind you of shallow thrillers we have seen in Tamil and Telugu.

Like I said, it’s an amalgamation of all the formulas. The basic idea is to create a parkour endorsing thriller and Jeethu fills the gap with his typical and already tried and tested things. The moments of excitement are very less in this film. Parkour at times doesn’t sync in with the whole picture.  Even though it was a part of the only exciting stuff, it never looked a crucial thing in the content. The sensibility of seeing four foreigners suddenly popping up to fight against the hero was questionable. The constrained frames weren’t giving that vibe to the film and the music department was also pretty average. The visual effects aren’t that fine.

Pranav Mohanlal has great physical flexibility like his father and that’s the only thing that is commendable about his performance. The always puzzled Adithya offers zero challenge to this new face. Siddique as always shows his calibre in depicting melodrama. Lena was occasionally eccentric. Jagapathi Babu is just there for the looks. Sharafudheen and Anusree have bagged meaty roles. Meghanathan, Siju Wilson, Sijoy Varghese, Aditi Ravi and Krishna Shankar play the other characters.

Aadhi is not going to stay in your head for its story value. The star launch aspect of it might get your sympathy. But beyond the Parkour extravaganza, this film has very less in terms of plot.