Daddy Cool Malayalam Movie

Ashiq Abu's debut venture 'Daddy Cool' is cinematically excellent, technically almost perfect and well acted-out. But still the film fails to impress you, especially on the story-side. Aug 16, 2009 By Thomas T

Ashiq Abu's debut venture 'Daddy Cool' is cinematically excellent, technically almost perfect and well acted-out. But still the film fails to impress you, especially on the story-side.

You might say the film tells the story of a father and a son. But it does more than that. The film can in fact be seen as two different movies rolled into one. The first half of the film dwells on father-son relationship. Post interval, it's the story of a super-cop verses baddies. The two halves, coming out as two different films, are filmed excellently well but still you feel that something is terribly amiss.

Antony Simon (Mammootty) is an officer with the Crime Branch and is very much attached to his son Adhi (Master Dhananjay). They are both passionate about cricket and also about each other. Their craze for cricket is a perennial source for headache for Antony's wife Annie (Richa Pallod). Antony even gets suspended from service for skipping duty to watch cricket while on a mission to nab a notorious criminal, Bheembhai (Ashish Vidyarthi). This irritates Annie, who goes off to her parents, who live next door, in the same building. This is a routine affair for them.

In the meantime Antony and Adhi, who are out to see a movie, chance upon a gang of crooks who seem to be creating trouble for cricketer Sreekanth (Govind Padmasurya) Antony comes to Sreekanth's rescue. Roy (Biju Menon), who is a colleague and friend of Antony and who is in love with Annie's sister (Radhika), takes this opportunity and helps Antony get much publicity in the media for saving Sreekanth. This eases the way for Antony to get back in service. This is how things proceed till interval. After the interval, things take a new turn as Antony and Biju set out to nab Bheembhai and save their reputation. Things take a new turn when Adhi is kidnapped.

The first half of the film progresses on the lines of a Kamal movie (Director Ashiq incidentally, was an associate to Kamal). The second part is more like an RGV kind of movie. This leaves one confused, trying to figure out what kind of movie it is that the debutant director wanted to make. Apart from that, his direction is simply cool, the frames are well composed, the action sequences well choreographed, and the art-direction and editing well in keeping with the scenes. The songs are just average, but the background score is good. The dialogues are OK.

Performance-wise, Mammootty, Master Dhananjay, Biju Menon, Saikumar, Daniel Balaji, Saikumar, Vijayaraghavan, Govind Padmasurya etc are good. Heroine Richa Pallod elicits a lot of booing in her opening scene, but the blame for that must be placed squarely at the director's door for overlooking the fact that people have seem umpteen such scenes before and don't like seeing it yet again.

It would have been better if Ashiq Abu (who is the director as well as the story-cum-screenplay writer) had tried to stick to a single track and had developed the story in a different way.