Bha Bha Ba review: Dileep, Mohanlal’s noisy film is so excessive it could make even Balayya blink

Bha Bha Ba story: A stranger posing as a member of a political party kidnaps the Kerala chief minister and goes about addressing the problems of common people in the State. His aides further add to the chaos that unfolds as the CM’s son, an equally-crazy NIA officer, makes it his mission to find his dad and punish the person responsible for humiliating his family.

Bha Bha Ba review: Debutant director Dhananjay Shankar’s movie Bha Bha Ba (short for Bhayam Bhakthi Bahumanam) marks the first release of Dileep since being acquitted by the trial court earlier this month in the 2017 actress assault case. The movie has already divided the audience, with many criticising top stars, including Mohanlal and Vineeth Sreenivasan, for collaborating with the actor, even before the verdict was out, and also because the actress-survivor had slammed the verdict.

With such a cloud still hanging over the film and its lead actor, it becomes difficult to separate the art from the artiste, a debate that Bha Bha Ba blatantly chooses to ignore. It’s one of those movies where the makers assume that spectacle, star power and sheer noise are enough to blast past the uncomfortable questions. Even if you judge it on the basis of pure cinema, it’s a bloated exercise that tries (and fails) to pay tribute to its actors and its genre of ‘mass’ films. It mistakes chaos for comedy and offers very little to engage beyond this.

If you were to summarise the plot of Bha Bha Ba, it’s about a crazy man who kidnaps a chief minister, holds the authorities hostage with the brand of madness as his aides - from children to a legendary ‘pan-Indian’ goon named Ghillibala - have a ball. But for such a movie to be enjoyable, it needed to have the audience invest in its characters - and that’s where the writing by Fahim Safar and Noorin Shereef fails. The characters are so over-the-top that they border on excessive, and at times, you would wonder if you are watching a Malayalam movie or a middling Telugu film featuring Balayya. Gopi Sundar's jarring score and Shaan Rahman’s songs don't help either.

While a few comedies land, largely those involving Vineeth Sreenivasan and a self-aware parody featuring his brother Dhyan, most of them fall flat. You would expect the arrival of Mohanlal to lift a film that is fast losing momentum after the interval. Instead, his entry only hastens the downhill slide of the film, which is punctuated by exhausting chase scenes, recycled flashbacks and a needless tail-end portion featuring a Tamil star, heralding yet another unwanted sequel.

Bha Bha Ba verdict: This Dileep and Mohanlal-starrer has little to offer other than an exhausting, noisy ride that tests your patience.