Dhoomam

Dhoomam delivers solid performances from Fahadh Fasil and Roshan Mathew. The story is great with a much needed message but falls short of an engaging screenplay.

The pace is slow, many predictable portions and poor editing. Jump cuts throught the first half makes the story less appealing. It confuses rather than suspense. The time is also a concern, could have cut short it further.

Music is ok but it does not add to the script.

Suspense holds till the end and the ending is good. Actors are great.

Can be watched for a different story line but as a whole film, it fails to deliver what it intends to.

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.

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.

The start is with the protagonist Faahad Fasilgiving lift to his friend (Aparna Balamurali) in an audi car in rain only to get injected with some drug by a stranger and finds himself on top of a hill with the car exploding minutes after him walking out. As unconvincing as it is, the screenplay is too far from reality as Faahad has revealed super strength like powers who carries Aparna to a godown. And the rest of story is a game of expected trivia between Faahad and Roshan Mathews(Sid) in act of survival.

Inshort the film is "Survivor series" remade in the length of a movie. Roshan Mathews gave a good performance impacting his role and the plot of the film but the rest of the Cast are merely puppets and address flaws in the script itself.