Kabadi Kabadi Malayalam Movie
Kabadi Kabadi is one of those dull sports that should never have been played. Replete with crass jokes, tactless humor and loads of mind-numbing moments this is a supposedly comic film that's decidedly headed towards disasterville.
Mambully Madhavan Kutty (Kalabhavan Mani) has quite a few old scores to settle with Mambully Vijayan (Mukesh), his illegitimate brother. Despite his lesser standing, Vijayan gets to set fire to his dad's funeral pyre which irks Madhavan Kutty even further. As the celebrated Annual Kabadi Championship draws close, the half-brothers oil up more than their bodies to win the contest hands down. This is a do-or-die game for both of them, and with love in the air in a twin avatar (Rambha), they would walk the sea to come up trumps.
The humor in Kabadi Kabadi is mostly of the slip-on-a-banana-peel kind. There's really nothing in any of it worth dwelling on, so flat is the writing. Almost all of it is such a godawful mess that you really can't tell if it was meant to evoke some laughter or not. And it's all mapped out in such an easy, apparent manner, there's practically no way to find it even remotely appealing.
If you haven't come across a film that's a snooze on almost every conceivable level, this is the one for you. Since there isn't a story, I would have to zero in further on the comedy quotient for closer inspection. It's diminishing right from the start, but soon becomes non-existent and pathetically depends on those rare one-liners that emerge out of nowhere.
When the whole movie is obsessed with a rivalry, and when the very premise turns out to be a catfight without the claws, you know something is dead wrong somewhere. The incessant bickering and arguing between the leads is a bit insufferable after a while, and then you greatly wish you had given this game the skip.
The most amazing thing about this entire enterprise is the belief that people have in making a likeable movie out of a lame script as this. There is barely enough happening in it to make a five minute tickler, forget a two-and-a-half-hour film.
There's not much enthusiasm here, even with Mani's vigorous attempts to steal the show. Mukesh looks a bit jaded in the re-run scenes and seems to sport an I-have-done-all-these-in-my-prime look throughout. A double dosage of Rambha did no wonders for me nor did a supporting cast in the almost entirely laugh-free scenario.
Quite hollow with hardly any laughs, an awfully passé romance subplot, and just plain nothing going on, Kabadi Kabadi would leave you squirming in the seats. It's an ill thought out cinema exercise that will have few enthusiasts cheering to it.
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