‘Khalifa’ movie review: Prithviraj Sukumaran stars in a shoddily written old-school smuggling drama

When a star plays a notorious smuggler, there has to be a compelling reason for him to become one. Vysakh’s Khalifa provides Aamir Ali (Prithviraj Sukumaran) a reason with some emotional pull. A one-liner for the film could be this: ‘a heart-rending story of a man who becomes a master gold smuggler to repay his honest father’s debts caused by corrupt politicians’. However, the narrative lacks the intended emotional pull or the expected thrills. The similarity to umpteen films released in the 1980s and 90s adds to the movie’s dullness.

With antagonists also being gold smugglers, writer Jinu Abraham differentiates between good and bad smugglers. Yet no effort appears to have gone into updating the old story, which has now been covered in Malayalam cinema from almost every possible angle.

Apart from its novel depiction of the ways smugglers operate and a few reasonably executed fight sequences, little else seems to work in Khalifa.

The hyping up of the superstar cameo has something to do with this lack of novelty. The cameo comes too late in the day, after almost everything is done and dusted, to have any impact on the story or on the audience. It arrives almost as a postscript, teasing the scary possibility of a sequel, but it is unlikely that anyone on the film team will be ready for that misadventure after how this one turned out.

Even if one keeps aside the novelty factor, one of the weakest links is in the writing of the antagonist characters – smuggler Harris Basheer (Neil Nitin Mukesh) and politician Raghavan (Shammi Thilakan). At no point do they seem like worthy adversaries to Aamir Ali, who is always two steps ahead of them. The conflicts also don’t create anticipation. They don’t generate enough drama in the sagging narrative. One of the plot points involving Aamir’s close friend and associate Samad (Sanju Sivram) is sketchily written. To make up for the lack of drama and imagination, some recent real-world incidents have also been woven in, providing a clear sign of lazy writing.

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Neither the writing nor the staging of the sequences produces memorable moments vital in a film of this nature. The repetitive background score and ‘slow motion walks’ of the characters add to the agony. Although Prithviraj has evidently put in a lot of physical effort for the character, there is nothing much he could have done with such a screenplay. Mohini, as Aamir’s mother, and Malvika Sharma, as Aamir’s wife, the only notable female presences in the movie, hardly get a few minutes of screen time.

If only a few late cameos could save every shoddily-written movie.

Khalifa is currently running in theatres