Sunday Holiday review: a movie you won't regret watching

Jis Joy makes his second movie along with Asif Ali titled Sunday Holiday. The treatment of the film has similarities with his earlier film Bicycle Thieves but there aren’t too many twists here to give a competition to Siddique Lal combo. The claim was that it would be a feel good entertainer; well I would say it won’t make you feel bad.

Young man Amal who had a love interest in a girl got dumped by her and in order to recover from the shock of it, he decides to go to Ernakulam and do some job for a while to get busy so that he can stay away from all the chaos. What happens in his Ernakulam life and how it eventually changes everything is what Sunday Holiday all about.

Sunday Holiday is narrated as a story discussion between a director and writer. And what you have read in the summary is that story. The problem is that this story itself has a lot of issues and unconvincing parts. So when you get to see a director calling it a very exciting script on screen, it is a bit uncomfortable. The story within the cinema has all the must have ingredients like sacrifice, sentiments and romance. While the humour keeps the movie alive, there isn’t anything that is novel about this content.

Asif Ali is very comfortable in being Amal, but the problem is that he can’t give any unique identity to that character. After initial troubles Aparna Balamurali manages to perform smoothly. Sreenivasan was fine in being that annoying, desperate writer. Siddique once again shows his flexibility. Sudheer Karamana, Dharmajan, Alencier, Bhagath, KPAC Lalitha, Asha Sarath, Lal Jose and a few more are there in different roles.

Writing of Jis Joy needs a reinvention. The old school melodrama and the added up humour tracks might work on an instantaneous level, but for an emotion to sustain you need to keep it as real as possible. I was hoping the on screen writer would get criticism from on screen director for all those flaws, but that never happened and that disappointed me. He should have reduced the subplots as some of it looks pointless. Cinematography was neat. The edits could have been better. The calmer songs were good while the club song was a total misfit.

Sunday Holiday won’t be a film that you will regret watching. It has moments of humour and sentiments that works in its favour. But overall it is a bit too elaborate and nothing that great.