One can complete watching Ajai Vasudev's latest feature with only agitation in mind. There's no way else one can endure 155 minutes of mindless sequences that cross all levels of logic or sense. Mammootty plays a dashing English professor in a government college currently embroiled in a crime thriller saga of its own. The students come to college not to study but to engage in gang rivalries and eve-teasing. Despite having poor knolwedge in phonetics, the professor plays an intelligent detective-cum-good Samaritan-cum-angel guardian-cum-loverboy who helps a group of students in a murder case that has put the studies of the college in hold for the time being. Nothing is logical in the film as one can easily predict in a Vasudev film. Moreover, the mass entertainment that it promises is only restricted to people who love watching human bodies flying in the air for minutes long and characters walking in slow motion. I even have this theory that if they had made Mammootty's character not walk in slow motion but in regular fashion, the film would have been 30 minutes shorter. And talking about editing, the first 20 minutes look like the makers forgot to hire an editor as random sequences play in front of you. With Poonam Bajwa as the eye candy and Unni Mukundan as this superhero cop, Masterpiece again tries to define heroism by giving power and convenience to the protagonist who seems to be more interested in crime than Chaucer. All in all, other than a captivating death sequence at the end, there is nothing worth watching in Masterpiece, easily one of the worst films of 2017. TN.
