Oru Thathvika Avalokanam review: "A shallow political satire that borders on cringey & rarely thought provoking!!!"

Whenever the topic of political satire movies comes up, the first name that most of us are likely to utter is Sathyan Anthikad's evergreen "Sandhesam". It is one of those classics that we never get tired of despite having watched it innumerable times & many of its dialogues are iconic. Prominent among them is undoubtedly Sankaradi's 'Oru Thathvika Avalokam' & hence when Akhil Marar adopted the same phrase for his debut venture, it certainly captured attention especially since this also belonged to the same genre. So was he able to do justice to the expectations???

In the wee hours of the night, Shankar (Joju George), a disgrunted PWD contractor breaks down the flag post of a prominent political party that had wrecked his life. With no witness to the act, the blame falls on the opposition party & tempers starts to fly between them. In the meantime, Nandakumar (Niranj Maniyanpilla Raju), a police aspirant gets caught in the political tussle due to certain unforeseen circumstances. With elections round the corner, this incident sets into motion various scenarios that has a huge bearing on the public's perspective. 

Apart from the director's cape, Akhil has also doubled up as the script writer & decided to talk about the political climate that is prevalent in our state. On the positive side, he hasn't taken sides & slammed all the three prominent parties in equal measure. In addition, there were a couple of dialogues which was right on the money regarding the sorry state of affairs that the public is subjected to irrespective of whoever was in power. But apart from this, there is hardly anything worthwhile in the movie that runs for about 2 h. The humour elements barely evoked laughs & many of the antics that the characters did on screen bordered on being cringey. On the technical side, it was average at best & some of the makeup props were mediocre. 

With a rather feeble script, there is hardly much that the artists could do but even then Joju (kinda reminded me of "Joseph" in certain sequences) has done a decent job along with Shammi Thilakan & Niranj. As for the rest of the cast such as Aju, Major Ravi etc have done their parts aptly. 

Verdict: Fails to cash in on the hype created by the title & turned out to be a rather shallow political satire. In short, even after three decades there is still hardly any other similar movie in that genre that could hold a candle to "Sandhesam"!!!

Rating: 2/5

Regards...Ben