The effeminate air of the lead actor aside, director Ajoy Varma's Malayalam-language directorial debut will be best known 20 years from now as a failed attempt not at making a film but at fooling its audience that it regards with the lowest of respect. Unlike the director or writer Saju Thomas, I paid attention to details in Neerali and I was put off in the first five minutes itself. For my non-pedantic friends, the turn-off will happen at Mohanlal's character's introductory monologue where he raves about his father's historical war escapades all while suppressing the flying powers of a housefly. That he later ends up in a carrier van with a half-dead man (Suraj Venjaramoodu), hanging by the end of a cliff, putting into actions experiments he saw on Instructables.com as a child, forms the rest of the 130-minute snoozefest. For a film that is marketed as a survival thriller, Neerali never becomes interesting, and often depends on its lead character's boring antics to grasp its audience's attention. With awful, repetitive background score that is supposed to make me bite my lips but instead makes me yawn, director Varma cooks up a film that is inconsequential, massively irritating (also thanks to Nadia Moidu and her ghastly performance), and ultimately an unnecessary addition in the database of Malayalam cinema. Neerali should not have left the editing room because it is so bad that I'm a 100% confident even the makers looked each other in the eye, shrugged, and waited with bated breath at the degree of failure their film would enjoy as the film reel/digital copy left the producers' office that Thursday night. TN.
