Velipadinte Pusthakam Review: a bland movie with poor script

When the combination of Lal Jose and Mohanlal happens for the first time, the expectation is to get an entertaining film with solid theme. The script of the film Velipadinte Pusthakam by Benny P Nayarambalam is the main negative of this movie. It is quite hard to make sense out of what is happening on screen as the practicality of most of the things in the script is really impossible. Because of the weakness of its script, this Lal Jose movie fumbles.

A college on the sea side is our focus point. The typical college had gangs and fights. In to the middle of all this, a new vice Principal Michael Idikkula arrives. He wins the heart of the students very easily. At one point he comes up with the idea of building a hostel for the college. But fund was the main issue they had to tackle. So in order to raise fund, he suggests an idea and the movie is telling us how the execution of that idea goes.

College students’ making a mainstream commercial movie is a thought that needed at most care in presentation to make it look convincing. Even after trying desperately to deviate the attention from the shooting aspects, Lal Jose can’t really make this thought from Benny P Nayarambalam look practically achievable. Everything that is happening beyond the shooting and its related process is something we have all seen in movies written by Nayarambalam and others a few years back. Towards the end there is this psychic element in the screenplay which also looked unappealing.

The narrative here is really flat. The sequential presentation of scenes reduces the life and entertainment from them. There is hardly any signature scene there in this film that we can talk about once you finish the film. Lal Jose as usual packages the songs beautifully and Vishnu Sharma has done a commendable job behind the camera in canning a lot of quality frames. Script is the soul of movie and when the soul itself is partially dead, director can’t really do much to make the film live. The zone of the sensibility of this film is such that you eventually end up questioning the practicality of a lot of important plot points in this film. Edits were wayward. The music was fine and the background score was a little too much.

Mohanlal has enough in his repository to play the dual shade of his character with ease. Both versions of characters he had to play on screen were played flawlessly by him. The best of talents we have seen in Malayalam movies in the recent past has got the chance to play characters in the movie and it is sad to see them getting lost in the crowd of actors. Sarath Kumar and Anna Rajan have fairly good roles. Arun Kurian wasn’t up to the mark. Salim Kumar’s role at times stretches the movie’s runtime. Chemban Vinod Jose and Siddique were good in their respective roles. Anoop Menon’s role is almost like a cameo. Priyanka Nair, Sneha Sreekumar, Alencier, Shivaji Guruvayoor, Jude Anthany Joseph and a lot of others are there in elaborate cast of the film.

The kind of enthusiasm and ingredients one would expect in a commercial movie directed by Lal Jose and with Mohanlal in the lead role is not there in Velipadinte Pusthakam. In a butt numbing 160 minutes, the movie occasionally slips in to boredom. A better script was needed for the movie to work well.