Maareesan Review | The Unimaginative Writing of the Second Half Spoils a Promising Premise

Even though the quirks of the character played by Fahadh Faasil in the new movie Maareesan are kind of familiar, at least to the Malayali audience, it has a very entertaining build-up that keeps us curious about how that character will try new stuff. Even the twist we see at the middle point of this film is quite interesting. However, once the movie enters the second half, all the hope we had about the movie being an exciting, fun ride goes away, and it follows the path of a generic thriller that uses this underwhelming shell of a road movie.

Dhayalan, aka Dhaya, is a thief who has just been released from prison. On the day of release itself, Dhaya plans his next robbery and chooses one lone house in the city. Unfortunately, when he reached there, he saw an old man, Velayudham Pillai, who had Alzheimer’s disease and was locked up by his son. Pillai offers to pay Dhaya some money if he frees him, and later Dhaya realizes that Pillai had a fairly good bank balance. What we see in the rest of the film is Dhaya’s tactics to get all that money from Pillai by exploiting his health condition.

When playing these fraud and arrogant characters, Fahadh Faasil has this amazing ease, which will almost make you a fan of such characters for their skill set. The way Fahadh tries to manipulate Pillai and reacts whenever his plans falter is extremely fun to watch on screen. And the first half of this movie is written with the approach of making it a film about Dhayalan meeting a peculiar old man. The 180-degree shift that happens at the interval point is jarring, but at the same time, it creates curiosity.

SPOILER ALERT! The issue with Maareesan lies in the second half. That part of the movie has the responsibility of clarifying who this old man is and why he is doing all these extreme things. Even though the reasons are somewhere giving a logical answer to the inconsistent Alzheimer’s of Pillai, it goes after worn-out ideas of vigilante justice. The writing feels extremely lazy in those portions, and the way the goodness factor gets into the movie is also very cheesy. The first half of the film was so fun that I was hoping there would be some exciting twist in the tale that would elevate this generic revenge tale to something better. But the backstory of the character and the reasons why he did all that were becoming too much of a theatrics rather than us feeling for his genuine intentions. There is a parallel police investigation happening in the movie, and the writing by V Krishna Moorthy is unable to create a sense of tension by making it a compelling cat-and-mouse game.

The performance of Fahadh Faasil somewhere feels like a collage of his performances in Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, Njan Prakashan, Carbon, etc. I am not saying the decision to render that character that way is not working. While you are watching the movie, this attitude really works for the character, and if someone is discovering Fahadh through this movie, they will definitely be in awe of his performance. But as someone who has seen almost all his performances, I feel this comical zone is an area where Fahadh should work in the future to create some distinctiveness. Vadivelu as Velayudham Pillai, to an extent, is an apt casting choice. Because he has the look of an elderly common man who has all the rage of someone who has lived a life. And in most of the areas, his inherent innocence adds a charm. But the ambitious nature of the movie is pushing that character into a typical hero zone, and in those areas, both Vadivelu and the cinema stutter. Vivek Prasanna gets a significant role in the film.

Sudheesh Shankar, who previously made the Dileep-starrer Villali Veeran, is the director of this movie, and we can’t see any directorial signature in the way he captures the scenes. There are many instances where thrilling sequences are designed in the most clichéd manner, and some of the emotional bits in the second half are also getting drenched in melodrama. If you are an aspiring writer, you can use Maareesan as a writing exercise by creating a fresh second half for it. Because the makers have obviously taken the laziest shortcut to find closure here.