‘Brother's Day’ review: just another mass entertainer

The film starring Prithviraj is not an utterly drab watch, yet you feel it could have been more original and engaging

The promos hinted at a genuine mainstream treat, a full-on festival fare plush from all angles. And Brother's Day tries to cater everything it promised, including the quintessential song-and-dance sequence to keep its entertainment quotient intact. But Kalabhavan Shajohn in his step-by-step, scene-by-scene attempt to create that full-blast extravaganza, leaves some loose ends and shock-proof twists in his directorial debut. The film, clocking 2 hours and 45 minutes, is not an utterly drab watch, yet you feel it could have been more original and engaging.

Brother's Day , with its customary Fort Kochi backdrop, follows Rony (Prithviraj), who works with a catering service. The film introduces a string of characters who are part of his life, including his sister Ruby, a young widow recuperating from a mysterious accident. There is the funny sidekick Munna (Dharmajan), the chilled-out millionaire Chandy (Vijayaraghavan) and his vivacious daughter Santha (Aishwarya Lekshmi). In between you are served several pieces of a puzzle and a peculiar villain, the undercurrents of tension rightly maintained in the first half.

The film with its tag of 'family thriller' opts to focus on family, leaving the other part under-explored. To start with, nearly all characters in the film have a solid backstory, but the most intriguing of them all, the psycho killer played by Prasanna, lacks one. While the film revels in those all-too-familiar family moments, it employs a very linear and prosaic style to change the course of the narrative. The script invests a lot of reel time in establishing the goodness of characters, but the crime which holds the storyline together, gets a casual and cursory treatment. It never evolves into anything out-of-the-box despite having an interesting premise.

Prithviraj plays the boy-next-door and at times his character seems like a watered down version of Amar from Amar Akbar Anthony . The four lead ladies deliver what the script demands along with the film's elaborate supporting cast. While the film boasts of some well-orchestrated action, music and camera stick to the conventional rule book of a festival release. Brother's Day may measure up to everything that makes a mass entertainer, but the film simply leaves it at that.