Human beings are using only 10 per cent of their brains, says a scientist early on in Jack N Jill. What follows in the next two hours seems to be some sort of punishment designed by scientists for the human race, for under-utilising their brains. It is a sheer assault on the senses that the faint-hearted will find hard to withstand. It is not often that one would come across a film where every department seems to be in a competition with each other in a race to the bottom, where cinema lies battered and bruised.
In Jack N Jill, cinematographer-filmmaker Santosh Sivan seemed to have been aiming at a science-fiction film built around the growth in Artificial Intelligence in recent years. Kesh (Kalidas Jayaram) has a dream AI project 'Jack N Jill', which his father had left mid-way through development. The aim is to build an all-powerful human of supreme intelligence and strength, but he needs someone with mental vulnerabilities for his experiments. In comes Parvathi (Manju Warrier), whose mental health issues are signified in the script using an iron box, which she always carries around. Maybe, there is some deeper symbolism in that iron box, signifying the plight waiting for the audience.
Jack N Jill
Director: Santosh Sivan
Cast: Manju Warrier, Kalidas Jayaram, Soubin Shahir
Ironically for an AI-based movie, the most annoying character is that of Kesh's AI assistant Kuttaps (Soubin Shahir). Kuttaps is a character inside a box, who chatters pointlessly in a mildly robotic voice (with a Kochi slang). Parallel to this, runs the antics of a group of goons, whose leader is a magician, while his son finds pleasure in injuring people using a razor blade that he always carries along. As if to mask their weirdness, they have a vicious-looking sidekick who continuously sips milk from a bottle and sings parody songs about the benefits of drinking milk.
If this whole mix was not enough, the young scientist has two sidekicks (Aju Varghese and Basil Joseph) and a girl next door who is trying extra hard to catch his attention. Not to forget a man who constantly utters lines hailing Hitler, the result of a scientific experiment gone wrong. The highly incoherent script, which is not sure of what it wants to convey, alternates between the science lab and the villain’s lair.
At no point does the film come anywhere close to engaging the audience. The whole science-fiction part is just a badly conceived cover for what is a convoluted revenge story. Jack N Jill is bad advertisement not just for Artificial Intelligence, but cinema too.
Jack N Jill is currently running in theatres
