PremiumThundu movie review: This Biju Menon comedy fails to work even in bits and pieces
Thundu movie review: Though the role is a cakewalk for Biju Menon, his talent is wasted here – much like Shine Tom Chacko and Abhiram Radhakrishnan.
Last Updated: 02.27 PM, Feb 16, 2024
Thundu story: Police constable Baby, who is in an ego tussle with a colleague at his station, decides to take a promotion test. However, his fear of the written examination, makes him resort to cheating. A series of incidents that happen in the life of the inattentive cop, who is supposed to be a responsible figure in the society, form the plot.
Thundu review: If there’s a genre that can do wonders at the box office if it works and make a two-hour film feel excruciating if it doesn’t, it’s comedy. Debutant Riyas Shereef’s Thundu falls in the latter category. The film has a wafer-thin storyline and is a series of incidents in a police constable’s life that are haphazardly stitched together.
In the first few minutes, we are introduced to the film’s protagonist Baby – who gets a call from his son’s principal, asking him to report to school. On his way, he carelessly causes an accident and then when he reaches the school, he is told that his son was caught cheating in exams with bits of paper and other material tucked, rather ingeniously, in places you least expect. Baby admonishes his son, albeit passively, and tells him why it’s important for him to be a model – especially when his mother tutors other children. Soon, the roles are reversed when Baby is caught cheating for a promotion exam for the post of head constable – and the news is flashed across the media.
Make no mistake, even if the film had been about how Baby sees the error of his ways or decides to further bolster his effort to achieve what he has set out, it would still be predictable. But instead, the writers Riyas and Kannappan here try to squeeze in a few more unconnected episodes in Baby’s life to stretch this plotline and add some semblance of humour and depth to it. Needless to say, it fails that test.
Some of these seem like sketches – for instance, where Baby and a squad of officers accidentally become victims of tear gas themselves, or how Baby, in a spur of moment reaction to see his wife while on duty, ends up a bigger mess – are funny, but they don’t fit into the narrative of the film. Even Baby’s issue with his colleague Ravi that is the reason he decided to take the exam feels trivial and is made even more so, with its choppy placement across the film.
Though the role is a cakewalk for Biju Menon, who has played similar characters before, his talent is wasted here – much like Shine Tom Chacko and Abhiram Radhakrishnan. Thundu also reminds you of Biju Menon’s pre-pandemic comedies such as Salt Mango Tree and Sherlock Toms that had a good idea but wasn’t good enough to build an entire movie around it.
The few sparks in the film come in the second half when Biju Menon’s character has a heart-to-heart conversation with his son, explaining why he is who he is. Baby talks about how he always wanted a dog to erase his loneliness but the nickname he has earned now makes him despise that. This scene also shows where the team has gone wrong in this movie – too many ideas but still not enough to carry a coherent plot.
Thundu verdict: This Biju Menon-starrer tests your patience by stretching an interesting nugget of an idea into a two-hour film.