Oru Yamandan Premakadha Review: it won’t disappoint you

Vishnu Unnikrishnan and Bibin George as writers have established their own brand of humor in Malayalam cinema. They are perhaps the upgrade we expected from someone like Udayakrishna and Sibi K Thomas. The signature ingredients of this duo are evidently there and since that recipe is still worth watching, Oru Yamandan Premakadha directed by BC Noufal becomes a safe zone film for almost all, including the audience.

A guy named Lallu who hails from a very reputed family is our main protagonist. He has chosen the job of painting as his career (painting houses and buildings). His father and younger brother are not really excited about this rebellious career choice as they felt insulted. And when this job became a problem for the younger brother’s marriage, Lallu’s father asked his friends to persuade him to marry a girl ASAP. The journey to find that one girl and what happens in that ride is what Oru Yamandan Premakadha talking about. The writers are the stars here. They know how to include humor in a template story that has only the basic structure. Both Bibin and Vishnu knows when will the audience feel annoyed about a certain level of melodrama or typical feel. They smartly redesign the scene to make it a sensible comical scene without ruining the emotional essence of the sequence. The whistle scene featuring Dulquer and Arun Kurian is actually a bit too much of glorification and you can see how they covered up that scene using humor. There are so many similar moments that could have easily gone wrong and they managed to tweak it smartly to make this movie that passable commercial comedy. There is not much of an unpredictable twist and turn happening in the storyline and that does make this movie an unsurprising one. But they know how to package it and make us forget about such shortcomings.

Dulquer Salmaan as Lallu could have been easily a misfit if you look at the kind of characters he has done in the past. But after a minor hiccup in the initial stages, he sort of gets the rhythm of Lallu and plays along with the flow of the film. He is actually lucky here to have that three men army comprising of Salim Kumar, Soubin Shahir and Vishnu Unnikrishnan who constantly makes the viewers laugh out loud. You can see the glimpses of the vintage Salim Kumar in certain scenes. Soubin is in his usual elements. Vishnu Unnikrishnan was also pretty effective as Teni. The two heroines, Samyuktha Menon, and Nikhila Vimal sadly had pretty much nothing to do here and that’s one department the writer duo is weak at. The star cast of the movie is extremely long with so many names coming and going in just one or two scenes. But one that will surely stay with you is the performance of Suraj Venjaramood. He proves the fact that you don’t need lengthy characters to show how good you are as an actor.

BC Noufal has managed to carry the tone in which this movie needs to be told. He maintains it in that zone between sensible realism and eccentric comedy. I had these least of expectations seeing the promotional material and to my surprise Oru Yamandan Premakadha was a surprisingly engaging movie. As long as their formula of making scripts soaked in humor doesn’t get the label of a cliché, their writing will work. But anything that gets repeated too much can become boring after a point. Bibin and Vishnu should try to reinvent themselves as scriptwriters in the next projects to show the world that they can do variations rather than merely changing the backdrops. The visuals were fine and the music was also pretty good.

As someone who enjoyed Amar Akbar Anthony and Kattappanayile Rithwik Roshan as passable popcorn entertainers, Oru Yamandan Premakadha never really disappointed me. If you are sensible enough to have a moderate expectation from Bibin and Vishnu, this movie won’t disappoint you for sure.