Dhoomam

Well, I didn't imagine a Pawan Kumar film to be dead from the word go. With a disjointed, non-linear screenplay, Dhoomam fails to deliver on two counts: as a mystery-thriller and a social-message drama. The intentions are good, but the effort clearly lacks conviction. The dialogues carry a dubbed feel and certainly contribute to making the audience feel emotionally distant from its lead characters. Aparna Balamurali's character is present as storytelling bait, and it's predictable from seven miles away.

The truth is, I can trust Pawan Kumar's skills as a storyteller. He did solid work in films such as Lifeu Ishtene, Lucia, and U-Turn. Here, the plot developments are mostly inane, and the thrills are lacking. For a thriller, it also makes the mistake of being over 140 minutes long while having no real tricks up its sleeve. The performances too are nothing to write home about. Ultimately, it ends up being an excessively long "no-smoking" ad cooked with the same level of creativity as the campaigns you see at the beginning of every Indian movie.

We should encourage more such stories that promise a better future.

It could have been a better ending with some punchline and some redemption. The ending was abrupt.

Of course it succeeded in describing marketing strategies and greed of industries like tobacco that thrive on addiction of it's customers.

One thing that I noticed was that most male character were not smoking but many women were. Especially in India where the larger proportion of smokers are male, this seemed incomprehensible. The men or boy who died of cigarette smoking were not characterised, but only referred. That was another missing point in the script.

This movie has got everything right in place but misses the heart of the film... Every thrilling factor introduced in this film with excellent narration and gripping screenplay abruptly ends on a disappointing note... Unlike U-turn this movie has got even better potential with a good underlying message oriented brilliant core concept, but the director's choice of execution turns out as failed opportunity... This movie has got decent amount of twists & turns with non-linear narration to keep the audience engaging, but to end it without giving any proper reasoning is what haunts the audience badly... Fahadh faasil is only one thing which can considered as a positive from the movie, intensity generated through his performance is far better than the real tension in storytelling... Overall: the central idea of the movie deals with hardcore emotions, but unfortunately that is what which lacks and makes it a one time watchable!!

2.25/5.

A feature-length no-smoking PSA. The amount of preachiness and the way everything is connected to the central theme feels so over the top and yet by the end, it feels like the least of all the problems with the film. The visual grammar of the movie is still a decade ago when South Indian films were successfully experimenting with new genres and little technical missteps were forgiven. I haven't seen his previous films but Pawan Kumar clearly has an issue with directing in Malayalam. His lack of knowledge of the language is pretty obvious in the dialogues and the way the actors are directed. Some of the scenes felt like the sketches my friends used to do in college where they don't know what to do with their bodies after the dialogue is said. Even Fahadh couldn't do anything with this stuff but at the same time, Roshan did terrific despite these circumstances where almost everyone else was terrible.

Corporate greed and lack of ethics are not at all just tied to a single industry like the makers may be thinking to make a movie in this way. Most people are also much more intelligent and knowledgeable about the effects of tobacco and related products than the movie gives them credit for even if there would always be a percentage who'd be always ignorant.

There were so many things in the movie that were so forced, so hammy in the movie but the dumbest of them all should be how it showed that none of the employees or board members of a cigarette company smokes because they supposedly know the problems, first-hand. Are these guys serious? That too in a city like Bangalore?

Even though I've only smoked three times in the last three years, I felt like I should have a smoke to recover from this.

The first half of the film was very very engaging and it was gripping to the core with a parallel kinda story-telling going back&forth, the interval block of the film was very well made and the film should've probably ended up there itself because the 2nd half was just about knowing the backstory of the vengeance and it was nothing special at all.

The problem of the film lies in its sloppy & disengaging screenplay in the 2nd part and the enemy of this film is its BGM since the bgm maker has done a poor job of not scoring any bgm at all and most of the sloppy scenes felt sloppy just because they lacked the bgm, there was literally no bgm at all when it was absolutely required.

This is a unique film where if you just watch the first half and walk out, you'll certainly feel like having watched a full movie and if you sit & watch the 2nd half, you'll regret not doing what I said earlier.